Exceptional Violence and the Crisis of Classic American Literature (American Literature Readings in the 21st Century) 3031078446, 9783031078446

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AMERICAN LITERATURE READINGS IN THE 21ST CENTURY

Exceptional Violence and the Crisis of Classic American Literature Joseph Fichtelberg

American Literature Readings in the 21st Century Series Editor

Linda Wagner-Martin University of North Carolina Chapel Hill, NC, USA

American Literature Readings in the Twenty-First Century publishes works by contemporary authors that help shape critical opinion regarding American literature of the eighteenth, nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-­ first centuries. The books treat fiction, poetry, memoir, drama and criticism itself—ranging from William Dow’s Narrating Class in American Fiction and Amy Strong’s Race and Identity in Hemingway’s Fiction, to Maisha L. Wester’s African American Gothic and Guy Davidson’s Queer Commodities: Contemporary U. S. Fiction, Consumer Culture, and Lesbian Subcultures. Beginning in 2004, the series is now well established and continues to welcome new book proposals. Manuscripts run between 80,000 and 90,000 words, while the Pivot format accommodates shorter books of 25,000 to 50,000 words. This series also accepts essay collections; among our bestsellers have been collections on David Foster Wallace, Norman Mailer, Contemporary U.S. Latina/o Literary Criticism, Kurt Vonnegut, Kate Chopin, Carson McCullers, George Saunders, and Arthur Miller (written by members of the Miller Society). All texts are designed to create valuable interactions globally as well as within English-speaking countries. Editorial Board: Professor Derek Maus, SUNY Potsdam, USA Professor Thomas Fahy, Long Island University, USA Professor Deborah E. McDowell, University of Virginia and Director of the Carter G. Woodson Institute, USA Professor Laura Rattray, University of Glasgow, UK

Joseph Fichtelberg

Exceptional Violence and the Crisis of Classic American Literature

Joseph Fichtelberg English Department Hofstra University Hempstead, NY, USA

ISSN 2634-579X     ISSN 2634-5803 (electronic) American Literature Readings in the 21st Century ISBN 978-3-031-07844-6    ISBN 978-3-031-07845-3 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-07845-3 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover illustration: clu / Getty Images This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

In memory of my mother, Ardythe Fichtelberg

Acknowledgments

Many friends and colleagues sustained me as I wrote this book. Terry Godlove patiently followed my progress in long talks over coffee. The support and faith of old friends Sharon Bond, Reed Kendall, and Bill White never wavered. My work also benefited from anonymous readers, among them a reviewer for Nineteenth Century Studies. Dean Bernard Firestone and department chair Craig Rustici helped to secure release time from Hofstra University. The interlibrary loan staff of Hofstra’s Axinn Library has been indispensable in securing the books I have needed. I thank Wallens Augustin, Dr. Alan Bailin, Jolene Del Valle, Sarah McCleskey, and Carol Saletto. I am grateful to Nineteenth Century Studies for permission to reprint an altered version of the essay “Emily Dickinson’s Picturesque War” (28: [2014], 87–108), © Nineteenth Centuries Studies Association. Other colleagues are now literally beyond words. Dana Brand introduced me to the work of Walter Benjamin and provided exemplary instruction in his masterful The Spectator and the City in Nineteenth-Century American Literature. Jeff Richards was an early champion of my work who helped secure me a position on the editorial board of Early American Literature. My Hofstra colleague and good friend Barry Nass sustained me with his warmth and humor. I am grateful for their examples. Above all I would like to thank my wife, Patti, and my daughters, Vera and Allison, for giving me measureless hope. This book is dedicated to the memory of my mother, Ardythe Fichtelberg, who continues to show me the way. vii

Contents

1 Introduction  1 2 States of Exception 11 3 Empty Places 45 4 Poe’s Chess Game 79 5 The Sublime Object of Freedom131 6 Claiming “Benito Cereno”175 7 Emily Dickinson’s Picturesque War217 Index253

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List of Figures

Fig. 2.1

Fig. 3.1

Joseph Racknitz, Ueber den Schachspieler des Herrn von Kempelen und Dessen Nachbildung. (Leipzig and Dresden: J. G. I. Breitkopf, 1789, p. 67; https://commons.wikimedia. org/wiki/File:Racknitz_-­_The_Turk_3.jpg) Thomas Nast, Out of the Ruins. Harper’s Weekly, October 18, 1873. (Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, Washington, D.C.)

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CHAPTER 1

Introduction

This is an interdisciplinary study of antebellum American literature, applying some central aspects of Walter Benjamin’s literary and cultural criticism to the problem of political emergency. In Exceptional Violence and the Crisis of Classic American Literature I argue that, in the unsettled era from the Founding to the Civil War, the United States endured sustained conflicts over the nature and operation of sovereignty arising from the dispositions of federalism. These states of exception involved more than the sectional differences emerging over slavery; rather, they originated in two different versions of governance, one often denominated the “internal police,” characterized by settled patterns of local and regional control, the other evident in a more diffuse and tactical approach to national governance relying on the elements of a “strong state” that was slow to develop. The period’s states of exception arose from these clashing imperatives— contests over land, finance, and, above all, slavery that drove national politics. The writers I survey—Edgar Allan Poe, ex-slave narrators like Moses Roper and Henry Bibb, Herman Melville, and Emily Dickinson—situated themselves and their work in relation to these episodes, using them as a critical window on experience. Violence absorbed and compelled that work. The key to antebellum politics and culture, I contend, is its deep investment in pain. To demonstrate these claims, I begin by situating Benjamin in a field often overlooked in the immense commentary on his thought, a field that © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 J. Fichtelberg, Exceptional Violence and the Crisis of Classic American Literature, American Literature Readings in the 21st Century, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-07845-3_1

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the French theorist Claude Lefort simply calls “the political.” For Lefort, the term indicates more than retail politics, but rather suggests the structural relations in “regimes”—those arrays of values, attitudes, and engagements that characterize modes of governance. Regimes in general, he argues, are marked by distinctive arrays of “sense” and “staging,” the langue and parole of public life. In democratic regimes those relations occur in what Lefort calls the “empty place”—the contested space of power that injects both agency and uncertainty into the political. Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe have underscored this contingency by describing the empty place as a scene of rival hegemonies—not the severe and stolid operation of state or class power examined by Antonio Gramsci, but the locus of passionate discourses vying for ascendancy. Such discourses include literary texts, and thus render authors and critics participants in the struggle. It is through this political realm that I read Benjamin’s work. In Chap. 2, I associate this so-called post-foundational politics with Benjamin’s oeuvre by examining his thought in relation to the work of Carl Schmitt. Almost every assertion in the last sentence has been vigorously contested. Benjamin is rarely read as a political thinker. Much of the political analysis he attracts involves the influence of Marxism, but even analysts who begin with Marx often shade into other modes of philosophical or cultural criticism.1 And while many readers acknowledge Benjamin’s fascination with Schmitt—Benjamin sent him a copy of his habilitation thesis, along with a flattering letter—Schmitt is too crabbed and controversial a figure, it is claimed, to serve as a major influence. Yet Schmitt had a deep effect on Benjamin during his early career, the period when Benjamin began to appraise contemporary German politics and culture. In the years spanning the rise and fall of the Weimar Republic, both men were absorbed in the problems of sovereignty and political authority arising from repeated states of exception—those suspensions of constitutional governance when political disarray threatens regimes.2 Schmitt’s answers emerged in a series of texts detailing the hazards of liberalism and popular sovereignty, and ended, in 1933, with his embrace of the Nazi party. For Benjamin, the state of exception became a metaphor for the challenges to political, historical, and critical authority arising from his experience of acute displacement that eventuated in statelessness and suicide at the French border town of Portbou, just beyond refuge in Spain. Although I do not contend, in Chap. 2, that Benjamin’s major works are simple allegories for political duress, I do argue that his cultural criticism arose from and attempted to account for those disruptions. In readings of “Critique

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of Violence,” The Origin of German Tragic Drama, the Arcades Project, and “On the Concept of History,” I elaborate what I call Benjamin’s fourfold method of analysis, a political phenomenology that I apply to American materials. Only such a global view of that phenomenology developed in tandem with historical circumstances, I claim, can do justice to Benjamin’s insights and their application. In Chap. 3, I turn to the American case, examining what I call the “extended early republic”—that period during which national sovereignty was tested, disputed, and fitfully consolidated. Normally one doesn’t think of American political development in light of Lefort’s term “regime.” We are accustomed to consider our constitutional order as a more or less imperfect mechanism set in motion by the Founders and allowing for continuous, often contentious and violent correction on the path to some corporate ideal. Recent work on American governance, however, has illuminated a broad swath of traditional power, an “old” regime overlain but not entirely displaced by the Constitution that contemporaries designated the “internal police.” Americans inherited this disciplinary scheme from Enlightenment Europe, which imagined the police as a paternalist extension of absolutist power promoting both the security and welfare of the populace—a discipline that would figure strongly both in American localities and, ultimately, on Southern plantations. These values clashed not only with the developing needs of the national state but also with the constraints and imperatives of territorial and market expansion. Under what was still a weak central government, such administrative gaps or lapses often resulted in states of exception—not the full-blown constitutional crises that Schmitt identified, or the equally tangled politics that Benjamin examined in the French Second Empire—but in marked instabilities and failures that affected local lives. Such repeated crises occasioned a definitive transition, by the end of the century, from the internal police to an effective police state increasingly absorbed by the need for security. In the extended early republic I identify three such critical periods: the early 1830s, during which Nullification, the Nat Turner rebellion, and Indian removal dominated national discussion; the Panic of 1837 and its aftermath, ending in the annexation of Texas and the Mexican War; and the travails over the admission of Kansas, extending from 1854 to the Civil War. The instabilities of each period had a marked effect on the writers I examine—Poe for the early period, Melville for Kansas, and Dickinson for the Civil War. Presiding over, and, in effect, encompassing these crises was the problem of slavery, assessed through the ex-slave narrators of Chap. 5.

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The peculiar institution was not merely the instance of a local or secular exception; it was the essence of exception itself. To understand the empty place of American politics is to address its contradictions. In Chap. 4 I begin to examine those contradictions in and through the work of Edgar Allan Poe. In recent years Poe has often been the object of ideology critique, the exposure of the racial or gendered content of his writing. I view him from a different perspective, through the tropes and material relations of the numerous tales he edited in the course of his duties at the Southern Literary Messenger, Graham’s Magazine, and the Broadway Journal. Like Benjamin, whose historical materialism led him to examine the artifacts of culture, I focus on the ways in which these forgotten pieces responded to the presiding exceptions of their times. Poe’s career encompassed the first two of those exceptions—the crisis in Virginia politics attending the Turner rebellion, and the Panic of 1837 that led to his bankruptcy. Like the journal writers whose fictions attempted to restore a lost or threatened sovereignty, Poe used his own texts to reflect on that agenda, often taking some surprisingly critical stances. Many of the inaugural pieces in Thomas White’s Messenger celebrated Virginia’s distinguished leaders, explained away its exhausted farmland, and blamed its political dissension on abolitionists or projected its problems onto corrupt political regimes overseas. Poe often ridiculed these stances, and although he occasionally defended slavery, he also attacked, through stories like “Loss of Breath” and “Hans Phaall—A Tale,” the absurd representations of Virginia’s sovereignty and its celebrations of the internal police. Many of his literary reviews are particularly acerbic, assailing the nullity of readers, the fatuousness of plantation novels, and the fragility of cotton culture. Less an apologist than a nemesis, Poe was sharply critical of a discipline that had lost its way. That critique took a decided turn during his years with Graham’s and the Broadway Journal. In the aftermath of the panic, many Graham’s pieces attempted to offer a moral explanation for the depression, blaming it on avarice, selfishness, or mistaken ambition. Yet the stories Poe oversaw were also marked by a certain sensuousness, investing objects with an erotic fascination that could not be overcome by discipline alone. In texts like “The Conversation of Eiros and Charmion,” “The Fall of the House of Usher,” “Ligeia,” and “A Descent into the Maelstrom” Poe attacked these compulsions, even as his own work exploited them. This was also the period of his tales of contagion, including “King Pest the First” and, again, “Usher,” which depicted the very mansion as impregnated with ruin. Such

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tales were in part responses to Poe’s own challenges during the period culminating in his bankruptcy, yet the stories were more than tormented laments: they were indices of political impasse. That sense of impasse was heightened during his final editorial post at the Journal. With the nation gripped by annexation and war fever, Poe reprinted a series of earlier pieces attacking unscrupulous businessmen and politicians, and concluding with “A Tale of the Ragged Mountains,” an exposé of imperialism. Presiding over all his work was the literal power of blackness, a trope that Poe used not only to convey a native racism but also to capture the travails of a political empty place impenetrable to discipline or self-control. In what seemed an almost permanent emergency, slaves were the bearers, as well as the objects, of the nation’s fragile sovereignty. Chapter 5 examines slave narratives as expressions of a national trauma. One of the turning points in Benjamin’s political reflection occurred when he encountered the work of Georg Lukàcs, whose History and Class Consciousness argued that all agents in capitalist culture were affected by reification, the corruption of experience that turned active thought into a passive absorption in things. This was the problem that Poe had identified in panic fictions, but in Benjamin’s studies of Baudelaire, the effects became more general. Modernity, he claimed, was beset by shocks so debilitating that all but the most critical were benumbed. The ex-slave narrators I survey, those who authored their own texts, were among the most critical. Their strategy was to invest both aspects of traumatic experience—the compulsion to repeat and the inexpressible mystery and silence attending the condition—with deep significance. Their texts turn repetition into an endless catalogue of brutality, as they detail a corrupt plantation regime. But they also address the central mystery of reification, the conversion of subjects into objects so crucial to a putative American freedom, by addressing their own betrayals. Almost uniformly, these writers have a single response to trauma: a rupture of language, a failure or incapacity to convey what they have endured. This absence, a version of the empty place, is a trope for what Paul Gilroy calls an “unsayable” cultural and political condition that marks their violent milieu. Recent work on these narratives has often emphasized an inner reserve of endurance or performative resistance that lends the texts a utopian or redemptive character. My approach is somewhat different. Far from disowning or rejecting a violence that renders them mute, these writers, I contend, deeply own such violence as the key to a national malaise. The empty place they discover is global, not psychological; structural, not

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tactical—a revelation of a shared condition. Their problems arise not from a perverse system alone, but from a matrix of relations in which violence has displaced capital as an agent of dispossession, and in which all are marked by the reifying effects of fungibility and exchange. Yet, as Emmanuel Levinas argues, this incapacity of language, the traumatic inability to articulate pain, can also be a powerful resource. In what Levinas calls the “saying,” the commitment to organize meaning through subjection to the other, ex-slave narrators offer a powerful critique of the democratic regime—undo its unsayable terror. In their work, silence and critical reflection coincide. Of all the writers I survey, Melville is most directly engaged with the state of exception. Like many assessments of Benjamin, commentary on Melville has often portrayed him allegorically, exploring problems of faith, nationality, or imperialism rather than more pragmatic questions of politics. This is particularly true of commentary on “Benito Cereno,” which, during the Melville revival was generally read as a Christian allegory, and more recently, as a brief for social justice. Almost no critic, however, has examined the text in relation to the presiding issue of its era, the contest over Kansas. Melville closely followed this national ordeal, and its intricacies and contradictions worked their way, both structurally and topically, into his text. To establish these claims I survey a broad range of political commentary, both regional and international. Congressional debate underscored the literal significance of the empty place, as partisans argued over the meaning, range, and locus of sovereignty in a territory with two constitutions and two contending legislatures. The controversy spilled over into Cuba, long the target of Southern expansionists who, in 1855, promoted a failed coup to secure the island’s slaves. In their tortuous assessments of both regions, spokesmen developed a distinctive rhetoric exploiting double negatives to limn fine, often unintelligible ethical distinctions—a rhetoric that makes its way wholesale into Melville’s text. International relations involved equally fine distinctions between privateering and piracy that influenced Amasa Delano’s legal entanglements before the Lima Audiencia adjudicating his reward. In “Benito Cereno” those distinctions, often as intangible as a fog-bound ship at sea, render moral judgments equally dubious. The details of the slave revolt provide an allegory of these conflicted claims. On the San Dominick, the state of exception is almost literally played out as a succession of theatrical roles. Just as Lefort claimed that regimes are structured through the relation of sense and staging, so the mutineers

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manipulate setting and action, often in ways verging on absurdity, to provide a facsimile of order. Amasa Delano is left to do the work of the internal police, the wise or deluded paternalist attempting to make these fragments cohere, even as those efforts are staged, and upstaged, by the ship’s real masters. In tracing such contortions, Melville not only levels withering commentary on the vain efforts of a slaveholding nation to explain its manifest contradictions; he also incorporates Benjamin’s unique appraisal of allegory into national affairs. In The Origin of German Tragic Drama, Benjamin superimposed the operations of allegory upon the effects of reification: just as allegory supplied an almost limitless and arbitrary catalogue of affiliations and references, reification, employing the logic of capital, dissolved all distinctions, even those of consciousness and reflection, into a promiscuous exchange value. Amid the moral ambiguities on the San Dominick, Melville implied, America’s politics had become thoroughly engulfed by the perverse logic, or illogic, of enslavement. If Melville was the memorialist of sectional crisis, Dickinson was the poet of civil war. In Chap. 7 I argue that Dickinson incorporated all aspects of Benjamin’s political phenomenology into many of the fascicles she produced during the war. Benjamin famously argued that cultural history is best pursued not through the philological method dominating the German academy of his day, but in assembling constellations, networks of artifacts and associations expressing a common problematic. Dickinson’s fascicles often literally bind together a constellation that marked contemporary responses to the war: the American Picturesque. Picturesque landscapes, like the luminist studies Austin Dickinson collected, used scenes of nature to convey spiritual awe, yet insisted on the presence of disarray and decay to provide a visual allegory for the spiritual pursuit. Authentic vision was a dialectic of rapture and corruption, a search for an elusive and fragile order. This attitude, influential in Dickinson’s day through the work of Thomas Cole and the Hudson River school, provided a common vocabulary for numerous soldiers, essayists, and artists during the war, who confronted the carnage through picturesque tableaus. An aesthetic, Christian consolation thus subsumed the war’s terror. Dickinson, who wrote a sardonic squib on this attitude, incorporated the Picturesque into her poetry—not simply to laud sacrifice, as is often claimed, but to criticize the carnage. From her vantage in Amherst, the war was more than a national trauma; it was a referendum on the savagery of the political. Like Benjamin, Dickinson largely saw politics not merely as a vehicle of domination, but as a means to purify and purge. The poems I select for

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analysis provide vivid, flawed scenarios of this sense. Thunderstorms swell into mountainous menaces, then quickly dissipate, or send lightning bolts that narrowly miss residents. A serene snowfall evokes a never-ending apocalypse; auroras swell with significance, yet seem ultimately meaningless. Such scenes deliberately jumble rapture and ruin, not only rendering the two experiences virtually indistinguishable but also draining them of consolation. The same elements appear in poems more directly related to the war. A poem about a convivial harvest is undermined by its references to the Battle of Gettysburg; another poem in the same fascicle renders mourning absurd by likening its despair to the protests of a sparrow. Above all, Poem 764, “My Life had stood—a Loaded Gun—,” makes it impossible to distinguish landscape, love, and devotion from carnage, obsession, and rage. Dickinson, then, like the other writers I survey, attempts to realize the crucial role of the artist in a critical era. Reflecting the desire of Walter Benjamin to convey moral purpose in emergency, the writers in my study imagine violence as the method, the means, and the matter of their visionary work.

Notes 1. For appraisals of Benjamin’s Marxism, see Margaret Cohen, Profane Illumination: Walter Benjamin and the Paris of Surrealist Revolution (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993); Esther Leslie, Walter Benjamin: Overpowering Conformism (London: Pluto Press, 2000); and Michael Löwy, Fire Alarm: Reading Walter Benjamin’s “On the Concept of History,” trans. Chris Turner (London: Verso, 2005). On Marxist influence, see also Michael Jennings, Dialectical Images: Walter Benjamin’s Theory of Literary Criticism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1987), 71–74; and Susan Buck-Morss, The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1989), 11–12. 2. Schmitt’s work on states of exception has attracted new attention in the Age of Terror. See especially Michael Dillon, “Network Society, Network-­ Centric Warfare and the State of Emergency,” Theory, Culture and Society 19 (2002): 71–79; Nomi Lazar, States of Emergency in Liberal Democracies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009); and Mark Neocleous, Critique of Security (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2008). Clinton Rossiter’s Constitutional Dictatorship: Crisis Government in the Modern Democracies (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1948) was the first serious post-World War II survey of the field. For legal and constitutional discussions, see Oren Gross and Fionnuala Ní Aoláin, Law in Times of

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Crisis: Emergency Powers in Theory and Practice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006); Gross, “Chaos and Rules: Should Responses to Violent Crises Always be Constitutional?” Yale Law Journal 112 (2003): 1011–1134; John Ferejohn and Paquino Pasquale, “The Law of Exception: A Typology of Emergency Powers,” International Journal of Constitutional Law 2 (2004): 210–39; Bruce Ackerman, “The Emergency Constitution,” Yale Law Journal 113 (2004): 1029–1091; and Jack Balkin and Sanford Levinson, “Constitutional Dictatorship: Its Dangers and its Design,” Minnesota Law Review 94 (2010): 1789–1866. For recent literary and cinematic readings of exception, see Emilie Morin, “Beckett, War Memory, and the State of Exception,” Journal of Modern Literature 42 (2019): 129–45; Ziad Adwan, “The Opera House in Damascus and the ‘State of Exception’ in Syria,” New Theatre Quarterly 32 (2016): 231–43; Steven Peacock, “The Collaborative Film Work of Greengrass and Damon: A Stylistic State of Exception,” New Cinemas 9 (2011): 147–60; Jonathan Elmer, “Impersonating the State of Exception,” Unsettled States: Nineteenth-­ Century American Literary Studies, ed. Dana Luciano and Ivy Wilson (New York: New York University Press, 2014), 232–42; Arne De Boever, States of Exception in the Contemporary Novel (New York: Continuum, 2012); and William Spanos, The Exceptionalist State and the State of Exception: Herman Melville’s Billy Budd, Sailor (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011). Schmitt’s most important philosophical heir is Giorgio Agamben; see the so-called Homo Sacer trilogy: Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998); State of Exception, trans. Kevin Attell (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005); and Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen, 4th printing (1999; New York: Zone Books, 2008). A recent overview of emergency powers world-wide may be found in Bryan Rooney, “Emergency Powers in Democratic States: Introducing the Democratic Emergency Powers Dataset,” Research and Politics October–December (2019): 1–7, https://journals.sagepub.com/ doi/pdf/10.1177/2053168019892436, accessed April 23, 2020.

CHAPTER 2

States of Exception

Readers of this book are all too familiar with emergency. The coronavirus pandemic has laid bare not only a common hardship, but also a deeper sense of violation, as we have witnessed the fraying of security and order. As from a shadow world, a visceral and abiding violence has become a presence in our lives. Two scenes of disorder, in Portland, Oregon, and Lansing, Michigan, capture these violent relations. Each occurred against a background of emergency declarations in response to illness and outrage. In Portland, protests over racial injustice began in late May 2020 after the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis, and lasted throughout the summer. A downtown complex housing a federal courthouse and the Portland police headquarters became the center of conflict, with protesters attempting to attack the buildings and police officers driving them off. In July federal agents from Homeland Security appeared and aggressively removed protesters, seriously injuring some. In Lansing, armed objectors to the state’s stay-at-home orders forced their way into the capitol building. Men with assault rifles and wearing tactical gear could be seen surveilling the crowd from a balcony in the senate chamber—a prelude to the far more disturbing invasion of the federal capitol building seven months later. Violence, in this instance, seemed to be both within and above the law.1 Neither intervention had lasting effect. In Portland, although demonstrators occasionally breached a protective fence, they never made it into © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 J. Fichtelberg, Exceptional Violence and the Crisis of Classic American Literature, American Literature Readings in the 21st Century, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-07845-3_2

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the heavily defended buildings, empty at night when the most severe action occurred. In Michigan, activists shouted in the capitol lobby but eventually dispersed, and the ban remained in effect. Yet both scenes exposed a latent violence surrounding institutions that ultimately excluded critics who attempted to confront terrifying forces of racism, infection, and economic uncertainty beyond their immediate control. The scenes were endowed with a danger and impotence whose effects have yet to be dispelled or resolved. Fear and terror were magnified by the states of emergency in which the scenes played out. While the Portland protesters engaged in acts of vandalism, federal forces damaged bodies and suspended civil freedoms. In Michigan the reverse occurred: protesters attempting to assert their freedom used weapons to menace civil order but left unscathed. While their actions widely diverged, both groups were responding to the same milieu of coercion, disease, and death; indeed, one study found that anxieties over the coronavirus fed apocalyptic fears of insecurity, even as the mass protests likely spread disease.2 The states of emergency thus defined a wider, almost existential, political response in which violence appeared to be the only link between assertions of freedom and an order menaced by the protests themselves. This conjunction of emergency and violence, I will argue, is a fixture of an American political condition that has its origin in what may be called the extended early republic, that period of democracy’s violent consolidation ending in civil war. Like the pandemic era, the extended early republic was riddled with emergencies signifying not so much a breakdown of government as its exposure to the forces of what Claude Lefort calls the “empty place,” that zone of contention in which clashing visions shape and alter democratic life.3 For Lefort, the empty place is the foundation of civil order, an urgent alternative to the totalitarian systems dominating the twentieth century but present as well in the absolutist regime that preceded the early republic. More than a variant of the public sphere, the empty place is a locus around and through which democratic polities express their deepest possibilities. Yet the clashes we have recently witnessed point to another, more troubling aspect of the empty place: an investment in what I will be calling “disciplinary excess.” In the emerging political order of the extended early republic, an order marked by repeated local and national crises, the nascent federal government was called on to manage not only the strains of rapid modernization, but also the demands of Americans for both freedom and the promotion of racial terror. To

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engage in disciplinary excess was to entertain and to exclude these claimants, to admit and eject them from the seat of law—and to make the exercise of law itself an instrument of violence. Such incursions point to an inherent violation that Walter Benjamin associated not merely with occasions of political emergency, such as the declarations in Oregon and Michigan, but with an abiding condition of violence that he called, after Carl Schmitt, the state of exception. For Benjamin, I will argue, disciplinary excess became a way to conceive and organize culture, to criticize and practice its violent functions, to embrace and reject social forms observable only in and through trauma. Yet, like the vacant courtrooms in the Portland square, the empty place was also the scene of a utopian possibility that Benjamin fiercely championed throughout his life. Like Benjamin, the writers and claimants I will examine attempt to position themselves both within and beyond the violent milieus that gave their work legitimacy and shattering power. The normative disruptions in political and social order that they experienced became the destructive essence of their thought—a violence, I will argue, rooted in the abuse of the enslaved. This study offers one version of that experience. * * * Claude Lefort may be rightly called the theorist of the empty place.4 In a series of essays published in the 1970s and 1980s, Lefort attempted to position postwar democracies between two stark alternatives—the absolutism from which they emerged through revolutionary violence and the totalitarian despotism to which, in the twentieth century, they often succumbed. Lefort’s structural model of what he called political regimes, or simply “the political,” was both vital and fragile, reflecting his own experience with political upheaval. Early in his career Lefort had been a Trotskyite, yet the fate of Trotskyism and similar communist heresies in the Soviet Union soon caused him to turn bitterly against his ideological origins. In that sense, Lefort’s theoretical writings reflect a European sensibility that may not be entirely congruent with American experience. Yet the broad outlines of his thought provide a point of departure on the path that leads to Benjamin’s political phenomenology. Lefort’s principal contribution was to imagine political regimes as what Natalie Doyle calls a “coherent symbolical projec[t].”5 That project entailed a broadly Lacanian claim to layers of experience that Lefort termed “sense” (mise en sens) and “staging” (mise-en-scène), roughly

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corresponding to ideological configurations and the performances through which those modes are conveyed (Democracy 11). Hence, regimes have a certain uniformity observable in their utterances and practices. For the absolutist era, uniformity was literally embodied in the king—or rather, in the king’s two bodies—representing the secular and the transcendental realms. That symbolic duality rendered the king “the guarantor and the guardian” of security and “certainty” (228), the material figure of order. The collapse of absolutism—the “disincorporation” of the social structure (17)—necessitated an alternate imperative derived from discourse rather than ceremony. Lefort’s striking metaphor of the empty place of democracy, that zone of contention defining public life, is roughly analogous to Jürgen Habermas’s analysis of the public sphere. But whereas Habermas imagines political discussion as a utopian projection of freedom, Lefort sees the empty place as an instrument of power, the means to reclaim the abandoned sovereignty of the departed king. Indeed, he recognizes a kind of demonic principle governing democracies, since power, in this new regime, “belongs to no one” (225) and society must be constituted through a primal experience of Lacanian division or lack. Given his own experience in Europe at mid-century, Lefort was pessimistic about this division. Unstable parliamentary systems between the wars all too readily yielded to totalitarian terror and to Soviet tyranny thereafter, expressing, in distorted form, the desire of democratic rivals to purge opponents who figure as “parasite[s] on the body” (14). In this regard, the diffuse operations of sovereignty in democratic systems may well be unequal to the very emergencies that made them possible. Lefort’s extreme case in point is the National Convention that governed France during the Terror. Suddenly, every discursive position became possible, and every possibility became lethal. The Convention’s republican discourse was little more than a “dissimulation,” veiling the desire to “exercis[e] … omnipotence” (86). So, too, the performative nature of power, the predicament that words alone could “give birth” to the people, made the very foundation of the republic elusive, obscured “beneath the weight of what cannot be said” in the absence of sovereign authority (79, 78). For Lefort, these antinomies were embodied in the language of Maximillien Robespierre. His demand, on March 31, 1794, to execute Georges Danton—the claim that “[e]ven … a million” deaths would be worth the sacrifice “to destroy a gangrene which might infect the rest of your body” (83)—is a chilling anticipation of the totalitarian fantasy of the “People as One,” even as it suggests a reconstitution of the

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king’s body as revolutionary throng.6 Yet the very violence of Robespierre’s claim also calls attention to the principle of order governing democracy: the operation of disciplinary excess. Lefort observes that the Montagnard Lucie Camille Desmoulins, executed with Danton on April 5, 1794, strove to the end to find a formula “for a gap, for an excess which will not go beyond acceptable limits” (77). The very tyranny of this democratic assembly exposed the normative function of republics marked by a proliferation of divergent positions, each of which is driven to extremes by the need to assert sovereignty. Lefort’s use of the Terror is thus a monitor and an admonition to contemporary polities that would ignore the limits of democratic order. Lefort’s trope of the empty place provides a powerful means of imposing ethical claims on democracy. His almost Hobbesian insistence that the effects of power may undermine any putatively egalitarian system forces us to think dialectically—to move beyond the mere contentions of party and policy to the structural relations of regimes. But Lefort’s political model is too blunt and monolithic to serve as a reliable guide to regime change. His adherence to a broadly Lacanian program causes him to espouse fixed forms and to argue that the varying regimes, like the king’s two bodies, are unified, abiding political codes. Yet the crises from which these regimes emerge—the suspension of order that produces order—suggest that political experience is much more complicated, that parties and factions—absolutist, republican, authoritarian—continue to vie for power and shape or determine its articulation in all regimes and at all times. This is particularly true of the upheavals preceding democracy, those extended periods of unrest that Benjamin would call states of exception. In that sense, the very openness of the empty place might reveal a more nuanced model in which dialectical contention confers a staying power, a kind of riotous order. The work of Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe has most forcefully advanced this position.7 While Laclau in particular has used Lefort’s claims as a point of departure, he has attempted to adjust the structuralist’s fixed forms through an appeal to the logic of discursive practice. This pivot involves a modification of the term “hegemony.” Whereas Antonio Gramsci has taught us to associate this concept with domination, Laclau and Mouffe claim just the reverse—that hegemony is a contingent form of influence tied to vigorous competition in the public sphere. Their argument, in Hegemony and Socialist Strategy (1985), is elegantly direct: Marxist—or in Lefort’s case, ex-Marxist—evocations of history have manifestly failed, demonstrating, in fact, that there is no engine of change, no

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overriding determinant in the last instance, only the constancy of rivalry and coalition. Their stance is a striking example of what Oliver Marchart calls “post-foundationalism,” the claim that “[f]reedom and historicity” rest on “the dislocating and disruptive moment in which foundations crumble.”8 The empty place of democratic order is thus, Laclau argues, “not a structural location” but “a gradation of situations involving partial embodiments” (Populist Reason 166)—diminished forms of sovereignty. Variable configurations, not fixed bodies or conditions, govern political experience. The term “hegemony” signifies those variable forms. Laclau’s distinctive vocabulary incorporates a range of critical terms. From Lacan he derives those “nodal points” that allow meaning to emerge from a contested field. From Gramsci he appropriates the term “historical bloc” to signify the array of expressions available at any conjuncture. His guiding influences, however, are Roman Jakobson and Ferdinand de Saussure. Arguing that political positioning is essentially a discursive interaction in which, like the corpus of language, there are no positive terms, Laclau maintains that the “logic” of politics in the empty place is essentially metonymic, a concert, or contest of substitutions and displacements as rivals vie for ascendency. In this formulation, the empty place is less a political structure than a condition of signification that cannot provide transcendental terms—only a “mélange” (Hegemony 38) of mutually constitutive relations, none of which enjoys primacy. How, then, is hegemony in the Gramscian sense—let alone revolutionary change—possible? In On Populist Reason Laclau suggests a model not unlike the trigger in a chain reaction: one discursive position, through its displacements and maneuvers, may present itself in such global terms—perhaps in the process of coalition building—that it establishes “equivalential chain[s]” (Hegemony xiii) through which metonymic substitutions abound, allowing the discursive formation to reach a critical, occasionally explosive mass by appealing to a wide audience. But in this ideal model, such moments of fusion cannot be long sustained, since they are subject to the inevitable decay marking all irradiated forms. Even the most powerful hegemonies are contingent, thus affording the possibility of disruption and change. In their insistence on a discursive model of politics, Laclau and Mouffe provide a rationale, at least in retrospect, for cultural critics like Benjamin who treat the literary remains of historical nodes. The vision of a universe of contending claims, clamoring and proliferating in the untethered manner of vibrant, democratic discourse provides a striking analogy for the disciplinary excess characterizing Lefort’s empty place. Yet the formula is

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not without its shortcomings. As Michael Kaplan argues, Laclau’s system, despite its post-foundational trappings, is essentially idealist, presenting contingent action through the operations of contingent thought.9 Hence Laclau’s historical exposition of Chartism in On Populist Reason traces a fairly conventional set of discursive political positions revolving around the republican formulas of virtue and corruption (89–93). But if Laclauan hegemony is somehow not sensitive enough for the hard-nosed, contingent relations of politics, it may provide a basis for assessing the strains of emerging democracies attempting to fashion the empty place: the Second Empire, the Weimar Republic, antebellum America. All three eras struggled to articulate political representations capable of binding diffuse social forms. All attempted to mediate the unruliness of regime change, and all strained to find new means of asserting power in an open and shifting field. Indeed it was the need for order that led Laclau to downplay one of the greatest exigencies of the empty place: its inclination to violence. Responding to the urgent problem of political and structural violence shaped the work of the most searching analysts of the empty place in the twentieth century: Carl Schmitt and Walter Benjamin. * * * Carl Schmitt first addressed exception during the Great War, as a censor stationed in Munich. The war emergency caused him to think seriously about the persistence of power, and he produced apprentice studies on states of siege in which he argued that, confronting emergency, military commanders could abrogate constitutional order. The state of siege was an “original condition,” one not prescribed by prior agreement and that consequently demanded a sovereign capable of bending form to emergency.10 That concern would shape his early, seminal work. In 1921, the year in which Benjamin published “Critique of Violence” (Benjamin would later write him a laudatory letter), Schmitt published Dictatorship, an exhaustive legal analysis of the conditions for rule by emergency decree. The following year saw the publication of Political Theology, with its central claim that sovereignty derives from the power to declare the state of exception. Subsequent studies—The Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy (1923), Constitutional Theory (1928), Legality and Legitimacy (1932), and The Concept of the Political (1932)—all were marked by the disarray in postwar Germany. While Schmitt, who joined the Nazi Party in 1933, still provokes controversy, his attempts to reduce complex polities to structural

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principles undoubtedly influenced Lefort, Laclau, and Mouffe (who explicitly acknowledges him)—not to say Benjamin himself.11 Yet it is also possible to read him not as an opponent of democracy but as a champion who sought a remedy for the debilitating contentions of the empty place. That he opted for the Führer principle betrays his deep, Hobbesian desire for a sovereign, stabilizing authority. Schmitt’s Germany seemed to cry out for such authority. Although many recent scholars, stressing political culture, have argued that, at least until the Nazi era, the broad contours of republicanism gradually took hold, the nation remained riven with fault lines stemming from its belated consolidation.12 With the advent of Prussian dominance under Bismarck, Germany became a constitutional empire in which real power was wielded by the chancellor. Bismarck prevailed by dominating a weak central government and discordant federal states in what David Blackbourn calls a “sham-constitutionalism,” a regime prolonged, and emphatically weakened, by Kaiser Wilhelm II.13 As Schmitt began to observe the scene in Munich, Germany had begun its brief, painful transition to genuine parliamentary democracy in what came to resemble a caricature of the empty place. The transition had three phases. A mutiny by navy personnel desperate to end the war ignited outbreaks on the right and left, with attempts to establish revolutionary dictatorships in Berlin and Munich and equally violent attacks from the protofascist Freikorps to eradicate communists. Political assassinations abounded, including the murders of Sparticists Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht, and Foreign Minister Walther Rathenau. Even as the Reichstag attempted to respond to the crises, the governing socialist coalition under Friedrich Ebert was stymied by fierce rivalries out of doors. As Ruth Henig observes, Germany was functioning less as a nascent democracy than as “a republic without republicans.”14 Absolutism still drove political affairs. Although political conditions stabilized after 1923, the accommodation was short-lived. In the republic’s second phase, from 1924–1928— the period during which Benjamin wrote and published his major critical study, The Origin of German Tragic Drama—rampant inflation was curbed, the Dawes Plan established Germany’s international standing on new, if punitive grounds, and something like coalition politics took hold. This was the period of modernist innovation that turned Benjamin toward cultural criticism, but it was soon overtaken by insuperable economic pressures at home and abroad. Nationalists, factory workers, and provincial farmers were chafed at the tax burdens imposed by socialist welfare

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programs, while the party faithful complained bitterly about mounting cutbacks to satisfy international creditors. After 1928, in the republic’s final phase, Germany became ungovernable. Fringe and rightist groups eroded the power of the Social Democratic Party, and, as one coalition after another collapsed over clashing imperatives and programs, the Reichstag itself became irrelevant. From 1930 on the nation was essentially ruled by emergency decree under the constitution’s Article 48, with power devolving to the Reich President. In 1932, the Reichstag was in session only thirteen days.15 The ongoing state of exception turned the polity into a dangerous hybrid, absolutist in its operation and fragmented in its structural relations. By the time Hitler became chancellor, German politics resembled a cacophonous echo chamber in which nothing could be discerned or resolved, a nightmare equivalent of Lefort’s empty place, ripe for the totalitarianism that succeeded it. These extremities forced Schmitt to focus on the relation between states of exception and presumptive legal order. In Political Theology he admits what amounts to a post-foundational premise—that sovereignty is a performative effect of exception, arising when a leader declares an emergency demanding the renovation of law. In Dictatorship, Schmitt delineates two consequences of this act. “Commissarial” dictators restore the law, using delegated power to govern unilaterally until the enemies or impediments are removed. “Sovereign” dictators, by contrast, commandeer the law, recognizing that order itself has become so frayed that no remedy short of abrogation can rescue it. Both measures are dramatic, temporary expedients, but they expose the abiding fragility of a democratic empty place that has substituted the performativity of constitutions for the dominance of sovereigns. While the near-anarchy of postwar Germany demanded a Hobbesian intervention, Schmitt labored to make even domination lawful by arguing that a sovereign dictator “does not suspend an existing constitution … [but] seeks to create conditions in which a constitution … is made possible” (119). Such a power “to do anything” (121) precisely mirrors and counters the disciplinary excess of a regime contentious by design and intractable in practice. One may see here the context for what Benjamin, in the same year, would call “divine violence.”16 Schmitt had already established the root of the German problem in Political Romanticism (1919), where he argued that the philosophical immersion in “occasional” experience designed to elicit fervent insight rather than dramatic action stifled liberalism at its birth. Romantic

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occasionalism was the original sin of democratic politics and the dark matter of the empty place.17 In postwar Germany, occasionalism had turned parliamentary conflict into a state of war. Schmitt was very clear about the violence, both internal and external, that was making a shambles of German democracy. The absence of a strong executive in a federalist system already compromised by multiple and contending classes, constituencies, military insurgencies, and insatiable foreign creditors had created a polity in which advocates were not potential allies but enemies. Like a monstrous version of romantic aesthetics, Weimar politics was driven by a naked and involuted pursuit of power. Any commanding party or coalition, fearful of losing advantage, he claimed, immediately and ruthlessly exploited its position: [in] a highly fragmented pluralist Parteinstaat, there are clumps of power subject to political influence… [so] ephemeral … [that] all … stand under the same compulsion: to exploit the moment of their power … Legality and legitimacy then become tactical instruments that each can use for momentary advantage.18

Unstable political coalitions not only prevented decisive action, they also invited counteractions of every sort, “hostile to the state or to Germany, or even godless” (48). Schmitt’s Catholic objection to a godless politics evokes the empty place with a vengeance, but it also suggests a far more complicated picture of regime change than Lefort or Laclau had in mind. Whereas both theorists imagined a relatively uniform array of discourses that bore a family resemblance, Schmitt’s version sees the state of exception as dominated by conflicting regimes—absolutist and statist desires to impose innumerable versions of the sovereign will in a milieu where no sovereign prevailed. The disposition of forces may have been pluralist, but the impetus remained authoritarian, a formula for violence that almost demands the intervention of a sovereign dictator. Schmitt’s embrace of Adolph Hitler in 1933 signaled that he had finally found a man equal to the times. Schmitt’s response to Weimar politics would be decisive for Benjamin’s developing thought—although Benjamin would far surpass Schmitt in his reading of the crisis. First, Benjamin fashioned Schmitt’s presiding metaphor, the state of exception, into a critical and cultural premise. If, as Schmitt argued, “the most decisive human grouping” always orients itself “toward [the] most extreme possibility,” Benjamin would seek out those

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extreme moments and measures most revealing of the structures they exposed.19 Disruption, for Benjamin, became the register of purpose. Second, Schmitt’s insistence on political theology—his argument that “juridic formulas of … the state” are “secularizations of theological formulas of the omnipotence of God” (42)—suggested to Benjamin not only the eschatological strain he preserved from his earliest work to his final reflections, but also reinforced a premise that the philosophical observer, like the Hobbesian ruler, was beyond the effects he surveyed—a premise Benjamin would labor to overcome. Third, Schmitt’s conviction that politics itself, of whatever sort, was marked by violence came to figure in almost everything that Benjamin wrote. Schmitt argued that “the political concept of battle” saturated the liberal state, so that the “will to repel the enemy … turns into a rationally constructed social ideal or program” (71–72). The friend/enemy distinction he announced in The Concept of the Political was the only useful measure of decisionist politics. In “abnormal times” particularly, Schmitt observes, such concepts as “public security,” “danger,” and “emergency” dominate political thought (Legality 32). This premise marked Benjamin’s most searching analyses. Both politics and cultural criticism, Benjamin came to recognize, were war by other means. * * * Emerging from the era that witnessed the collapse of the Weimar Republic, Benjamin’s political phenomenology was steeped in exception. His immersion in the cultural artifacts of France during the Second Empire was, in effect, an allegory and premonition of the structural conflicts evident in Germany. The relations are deeply resonant, for each historical milieu highlights the dialectical nature of exception in which competing regimes and protocols often “battle,” in the manner of Schmitt’s political model. But Benjamin’s phenomenology, developed and modified over two decades, is more expansive than Schmitt’s grim caricature. Through his encounters with Marxism, surrealism, and the Paris of Charles Baudelaire, Benjamin elaborated a cultural critique melding structural and performative elements striving for mastery of a violent and shifting order. Benjamin’s mature hermeneutic constitutes a fourfold method in which history, politics, representation, and experience are constantly in play; yet the method is not a tool of reflection alone. For Benjamin’s exhaustive—apparently interminable—analysis of nineteenth-century Paris in the Arcades Project

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is also a means of critical self-reflection—an attempt to address scenes of violence from which more conventional critics sought exemption. Benjamin’s most profound contribution to a critique of the empty place was to recognize in disciplinary excess the engine, and the limit, of critical thought itself. Benjamin’s abiding interest in Charles Baudelaire, stemming from his translation of Les fleurs du mal (1923), was the source of his political phenomenology.20 Baudelaire’s France provided an almost uncanny anticipation of the instabilities that would afflict Weimar Germany. As Karl Marx noted, the contesting pressures of radicals and conservatives amid an erratic economy whipsawed by unemployment and government pump-­ priming induced a prolonged emergency in which monarchs and dictators rapidly traded places with revolutionary upstarts and provisional governments. In February 1848, King Louis-Philippe was ousted after a nearly eighteen-year reign, and the Second Republic declared under a provisional government. Sweeping reforms, including universal manhood suffrage and the establishment of National Workshops providing make-work for the unemployed, were quickly instituted by the National Assembly, yet these measures did not appease radicals, who invaded the Assembly on May 15, declared a new provisional government, and were summarily jailed. The failed coup, along with the heavy burden of new taxes to finance the workshops, in turn aroused conservatives, who soon found the votes to discontinue the benefit. In June, a new working class revolt ensued, during which scores of barricades immobilized Paris. It took over 100,000 troops under General Louis-Eugène Cavaignac to dislodge them, and in the resulting state of siege, Cavaignac assumed the role of commissarial dictator. After defeating the insurgency he was ordained effectual premier by the Council of Ministers, answering to a provisional National Assembly doubling as a constitutional convention. Emergency rule prevailed: radicals were deported, their newspapers silenced, political clubs closed. The state of siege, Cavaignac declared, was the indispensable “law of public safety.” Yet when martial law ended and a new presidential election was held, the surprising victory of Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte, who billed himself as a politician above politics, set the stage for yet another coup d’état that made him emperor almost four years later.21 Bourgeois democracy, after flirting with radical revolution, had slipped back into absolutist rule—or rather into a strange hybrid of political repression and modest liberal reform. In effect, Bonaparte had transformed himself from a constitutional president into a sovereign dictator.

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For Benjamin, the extremities of the era conveyed an irresistible appeal. Cultural constellations, he believed, emerged from radically discordant materials that collided, as in a nuclear accelerator, to reveal their elemental forms. Much like Weimar Germany, with its tides of revolution and reaction, mid-century France offered the spectacle of an empty place in its purest, unregulated condition, a political theater dominated by disciplinary excess. The era was saturated in what Benjamin called law-making and law-preserving violence—the dialectics of power, insurgency, and repression that characterized democracies emerging from absolutist rule. That dialectic often assumed disturbing forms. Matthew Truesdell has described the “Caesarism” that linked elaborate state ceremony with the most resolute tyranny. Louis-Napoléon’s investiture as emperor was conducted at Notre Dame cathedral, decked out for the occasion with “large painted representations of Charlemagne, Saint Louis, Louis XIV, and Napoleon” blanketing the cathedral’s towers.22 At a cost of 125,000 francs, the state had embraced the church in a stranglehold. Yet the pressure was even more severe in the provinces, where subversive parties or performances— even red clothing—was rigorously outlawed. As Marx noted, however, such repression inevitably summoned a counterforce, an irrepressible resistance that had, in fact, propelled Bonaparte to office. “[A]longside ruined and adventurous offshoots of the bourgeoisie,” he dryly observed, the coalition assembled by the would-be emperor included “vagabonds, discharged soldiers, discharged jailbirds, escaped galley slaves, rogues, mountebanks, lazzaroni, pickpockets, … literati, organ-grinders, rag-­ pickers, knife grinders, tinkers, beggars—in short, the whole indefinite, disintegrated mass … which the French term la bohème.”23 As Benjamin would later argue, it was precisely this subversive yet self-­serving order of malcontents and opportunists that fueled the contradictions of the era— contradictions that formed the heart of his exemplar, Charles Baudelaire’s oeuvre and impact. From such diffuse and volatile materials, Benjamin would construct an enduring cultural critique not only of the Second Empire, but also of the state of exception that engendered it. The first step in that process was his 1921 essay “Critique of Violence.”24 Here Benjamin seeks a standard or model for the deadly politics of regime change. Most of the essay is given over to exposing the inherent violence—Gramsci would call it “coercion”—of any regime, since all law involves the ultimate maintenance of power. Benjamin distinguishes between the revolutionary force of law-making violence, evident in

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various defenses of natural law, and the structural domination of a law-­ preserving violence that shapes subjects to its own ends. In effect, the two premises compose a dialectic in which insurgencies are met by ever more stringent applications of order, even as coercion breeds such instabilities as workers’ strikes and a defiant identification with criminals. Only toward the end of the essay does Benjamin attempt to step beyond this circle, by contrasting mythic law, which establishes the “frontie[r]” between human experience and the demands of coercive “fate” (SW 1:248), and divine violence such as Yaweh visited on Korach, which annuls frontiers. Although such violence may be annihilating, he argues, it is also liberating, delivering a blow against the structure of law itself. To get beyond law, Benjamin argues, is to see humanity as affirming its essential relation to this violence in a condition more comprehensive than political enmity—a common sense of our insufficiency he calls guilt. The term suggests not merely a violation of positive law; rather, guilt bestows a sacredness on each individual that reflects a surpassing relation to God. But the very violence of which humanity is capable reveals as well its infinite distance from unconditional justice and thus the dialectical need for renewed “annihilation” (250). For this reason, Benjamin contends, God alone exercises a foundational violence that is truly “sovereign” (252). It is in Benjamin’s evocation of sovereign violence that he engages most closely with Schmitt. Whereas Schmitt attempted to find a constitutional solution to the intractable violence plaguing the Weimar Republic, Benjamin sought a philosophical response that put violence itself on trial. Most significant in this regard is his alteration of a key aspect of Georges Sorel’s treatment of myth. In Reflections on Violence (1908), Sorel, who receives favorable notice in the “Critique,” argued that only a proletarian general strike could be truly revolutionary, since “political” strikes for merely local aims—the kind of “lawful” intervention that Schmitt associates with commissarial dictators—would never address the key betrayals of a law-preserving violence that punished the working class.25 Sorel’s “mythic” violence, however, is ultimately undermined by his attempt to cast general strikers as heroes for whom any violent act is justified by their commitment to a natural law that verges on fascism. It was this possibility, in part, that led Benjamin to reject all forms of mythic violence as contributing to an illusion of fate that traps us, like Niobe, in cycles of limitless self-destruction. Divine violence shattered this frame through “executive” means—opening the possibility of an existence beyond the dialectic of law-making and law-preserving violence—but the ends of that condition

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are beyond human control (SW 1:252). The only solution to violence, Benjamin seems to be saying, lies in our mutual incapacity. Benjamin begins the essay by suggesting that his approach has been influenced by European developments, and he makes numerous references to the instabilities of postwar Germany, explicitly mentioning, in his discussion of divine violence, “the suspension of law” and “the abolition of state power” (251–52).26 But the fact that he recurs to an unassailable sovereign to remedy his philosophical problem indicates that he has not yet distanced himself from Schmitt, whose structuralism exerted a powerful hold. Benjamin would come to recognize that a rigorous critique of violence had to involve not ultimate, and frankly gnomic meditations on philosophical or existential distinctions but an exhaustive examination of conditions on the ground—conditions rooted in the state of exception that would preoccupy the two thinkers throughout the interwar period. For Benjamin, this analysis came to entail political questions—or rather, as Lefort would have it, questions of the political—that could be answered only through cultural analysis, one that imagined a dialectic not of natural and positive law, but of the historical conditions that made law possible. The Origin of German Tragic Drama (1928) begins that process by examining the dialectical contest of history and representation.27 Benjamin’s discussion of Baroque tragedy attempts to meld a frankly idealist theory of criticism to a brutalist assessment of politics. His principal weapon is allegory. In the polemical “Epistemo-Critical Prologue,” Benjamin contrasts the crabbed method of German philology, which seeks a kind of Linnaean logic in literary works, to that of the inspired critic who, like Plato, pursues beauty itself in the realm of ideas. That pursuit demands a willingness to entertain extremes. Just as he sought an unassailable sovereign in “Critique of Violence,” so Benjamin now insisted on the transcendent agency of language through “the symbolic character of the word” (36). Yet this approach, which he first announced in “The Task of the Translator” (1923), his introduction to the edition of Baudelaire, was complicated by its immersion in material “context[s]” (33) that blurred their significance. Criticism thus became a kind of excavation of the pure “configuration of the idea” from the ore of “extremes and apparent excesses” in which it was embedded (47). The refinement of meaning in this dialectical process is precisely analogous to the effects of divine violence. Like Korach, who was immolated for the law, textual materials had to be “burn[ed] up” so that the Word could “achiev[e] its most brilliant

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degree of illumination” (31). The desire for an unassailable, annihilating sovereignty drives Benjamin’s critical method. From this perspective, the Baroque sovereigns of the Trauerspiel seem poor candidates for illumination. While the Baroque king should represent the historical force of law, his authority has been so disrupted by “catastrophe[e]” and “emergency” (65; for “emergency” Benjamin uses Schmitt’s German term, Ausnahmezustand—“state of exception”)28 that sovereign assertion is no longer possible and only a divine cataclysm can restore order (65–66). Far from declaring or resolving states of exception, the Baroque version of Schmitt’s Hobbesian ruler operates in “a constantly shifting emotional storm,” determined “not … by thought, but by changing physical impulses” (71). If Schmitt’s historical myth involves the triumph of order over violent contingency, Benjamin’s literary state of exception displays a polity “driven along [by] a cataract” (66). Hence the distinguishing mark of the Trauerspiel, its immersion in a spectacular violence approaching, if not exceeding, that of grand guignol, is a prime representation of those extremities that reveal the most profound truths— a shattering of the moral universe exposing the nasty, brutish composition of humanity. Yet the goal in martyr drama remains “the restoration of order in the state of emergency”—a dictatorship whose “utopian” aim is not merely the exchange of “historical accident” for the “iron constitution” of natural law, but the “fortification against a state of emergency in the soul” (74). Exception has thus become more than a political condition; it now figures as the frame for the critical analysis of dialectical moments that illuminate philosophical truth. Yet the battleground has also shifted, from the Baroque court to the workings of the mind. For Benjamin, this dialectic has the potential to upset the neat distinction between philology and aesthetic truth announced in the introduction. Superficially, inspired truth corresponds to the traditional notion of the symbol as agent of transcendence. “As a symbolic construct,” he argues, “the beautiful is supposed to merge with the divine in an unbroken whole” (160), revealing a “mystical,” if veiled significance (165). Not so with allegory, the characteristic mode of the Trauerspiel. Allegory is the appropriate, indeed, the only representation equal to the violent excess of Baroque drama. If the symbolic mode suggests transformation and redemption, allegory entails the “untimely” or “sorrowful” aspects of nature—including human nature—ineluctably linked to a “death’s head” (166). The symbolic is focused, resonant, concentrated; allegory is dispersed, arbitrary, disjointed—a representation intrinsic to states of

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exception. Indeed, in a telling, yet more severe, prefigurement of Laclau’s “equivalential chains,” allegory, Benjamin declares, demonstrates that “[a]ny person, any object, any relationship can mean absolutely anything else” (175). It is the perfect formula for the political drift of Weimar Germany enduring the agonizing throes of regime change in the empty place. Death was the universal equivalent for a polity that had cast off all absolutism for an endless and paralyzing impulsiveness. In that sense the Thirty Years’ War shadowing the Trauerspiel was echoed in the Great War and its ruinous aftermath inescapably menacing Benjamin’s work as the German republic began its long slide into fascism. Baroque drama provided an origin story for modernist emergency. To be sure, Benjamin no more allows his Trauerspiel study to end in despair than he permitted “Critique of Violence” to conclude without an anticipated redemption. But his gesture to the arbitrariness of allegorical representation signals a telling shift in—or addition to—his hermeneutic method. A year after Benjamin published his translation of Baudelaire, he encountered Georg Lukàcs’s History and Class Consciousness (1923).29 Like Max Weber, Lukàcs argued that a rationalized capitalism penetrated every aspect of life, including consciousness itself. The world that capital fashioned was one in which natural law displaced human action, rendering the mind a mere spectator of an existence that “lies, methodologically and in principle, beyond its grasp” (104). One can already see the symptoms of reification in an idealism like Plato’s or Immanuel Kant’s, which seeks “to weed out ruthlessly … every subjective and irrational element and every anthropomorphic tendency” (128), a chilling anticipation of Marx’s commodity fetishism. But this epistemological violence had an unanticipated consequence, since, in a world dominated by capital and exchange, the mind itself assumes the abstract and soulless function of a thing. From this standpoint, pure truth or the symbolic character of the word were mystifications, flights from the material basis of thought, and reification functioned precisely like allegory, displacing meaning in an infinite array of substitutions. In such a hollowed world, any relationship could mean absolutely anything else. Benjamin, who read Lukács as he was writing his habilitation thesis, immediately recognized the profound challenge that reification posed to his hermeneutic method, since reified thought could not also claim sovereignty. This experiential element of thought, the inescapable impress of the relation of things to the function of the mind, introduced a kind of interior violence that became integral to Benjamin’s political phenomenology. Indeed, the problem of finding a point of

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abstraction from which to catalogue the configurations of experience was the driving force behind the Arcades Project. Even Lukàcs could not demonstrate how to step outside the benighted circle of capital to mount his critique. How, then, was historical materialism possible? A true metaphysics of experience would have to find a dialectic, or web of dialectics, rich enough to capture the shifts and instabilities exposed by reification. Benjamin found his answer in a phenomenology of the state of exception. With the publication of his failed habilitation thesis, then, Benjamin was eager to leave behind Baroque Germany and train his sights on the modern world. The submerged allegory of Weimar would become, with the rise of fascism, a cultural critique of European origins. With far more depth than Schmitt or his political successors, and with far more sensitivity than his more doctrinaire friend Theodor Adorno, Benjamin elaborated a fourfold method that sought out dialectical expressions in a variety of modes tied to states of exception.30 From Schmitt he appropriated the political dialectic of friend/enemy, with its desire to master and purge a recalcitrant order. Through the Trauerspiel, he deepened an engagement with representation and its insistence on the dispersal of allegorical reference. And in subjecting history to cultural critique, he sought out those extreme moments—those states of exception—in which structural relations are laid bare. These extreme possibilities—the contingencies, confusions, and assaults of experience—contribute to a matrix or configuration through which Benjamin came to examine Baudelaire’s Paris. But it is the fourth moment of his hermeneutic—the engagement with experience that Marxists called reification or abstraction—that provided the capstone of a thoroughgoing cultural critique. As Benjamin sat in the reading room of the Bibliothèque Nationale, his monumental study of mid-century Paris, with its tides of revolution and reaction, became an allegory for postwar Germany; and as his refuge turned into a place of exile, then a place of internment, the abstractions of scholarship came to seem equally fragile and contingent. Benjamin ultimately recognized that violence and exception were not merely objects of study; they constituted the subject as well. Before presenting Benjamin’s mature reckoning with the empty place in a state of exception, it might be useful to rehearse the argument so far. Benjamin’s political phenomenology will attempt to account for the instabilities of an emerging democratic regime. Like Laclau, he will seek out modes of articulation—those repeated affiliations and homologies suggesting coalitions of interest and attitude in a post-foundational milieu unsecured by grand narratives or sovereign bodies. His fourfold hermeneutic of historical, representational, political, and experiential elements

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constitutes what Laclau calls equivalential chains—those modes of signification that democratic polities use to achieve hegemony. But Benjamin’s Marxist analysis also makes him sensitive to the traumatic disciplinary effects of these contingencies, so that the inherently violent relations he examines always threaten to throw the fragile empty place into renewed conflict or exception, demanding the intervention of a Hobbesian sovereign, as Lefort warns. That is, in fact, what happened in France in 1852, and in Germany in 1933. Hence, Benjamin’s historical materialism is not simply an attempt to infuse the past with renewed significance through “violent” critical disruption; it is an effort to respond to the present moment on its own terms and to interrogate cultural dislocations inciting the states of exception that make emergent democracies all the more volatile. Benjamin’s analysis is poised between a profound historical pessimism and the illuminating possibilities of the hermeneutic strategies he brings to bear, most urgently in his masterwork on Paris. * * * Although, as Susan Buck-Morss has observed, it is not possible to find a single through-line in the massive repository of the Arcades Project, Benjamin’s research notes suggest a constellation of concerns bearing on the states of exception uniting Paris and Berlin—concerns that would become more exigent as the Nazis forced him into exile.31 The mythic law he had surveyed in “Critique of Violence” had now become an organizing principle for which his circle of dialectical relations provided an index and a legend. Léon Daudet’s vision of Paris from the summit of Montmartre— the city itself, Benjamin recorded, deployed as if “in expectation of some cataclysm”—suggests the researcher’s “divine” or abstract purpose as he gathered materials from his own secure summit, even as he excavated the city’s ruins. “The agglomeration is menacing; the enormous labor is menacing,”32 claimed Daudet in a prevision of Benjamin’s self-consuming project. For Benjamin, the labor was a kind of exorcism, both a redoubt and a surgical tool. Daudet’s cataclysm defines the confused signs of a regime change that left its debris everywhere. Benjamin is particularly keen to uncover its most volatile political forms. It was said that, during the June Insurrection, incensed proletarian women castrated imprisoned guardsmen, that sulfuric acid was hurled from the barricades, which had been adorned with the heads of soldiers mounted on pikes (702, a2a,2). Yet the insurgents’ terror

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was met with a countervailing move by the government literally to purge the city by blockading sewers to hunt down incendiaries. There is a kind of magical, almost utopian logic to these actions, as if the city were attempting through this clash of revolution and reaction to define a political formula beyond the realm of mythic law. This is the premise that Schmitt had applied to the Weimar era, a field of conflict in which all political opponents were enemies and the sole legitimate action entailed purging or annihilating one’s adversary. Yet in hindsight, the net effect of this trauma was a kind of frenzied stasis that Benjamin called “petrified unrest” (329, J55a,4). The “‘centrifugal and disintegrating force’” (258, J17,1) of regime change had saturated every aspect of the Second Empire, so that to interpret its content meant to develop what Benjamin called “political categories” (392, K2,3). This perspective appears in a haunting entry on the barricades. At the height of the rebellion, Paris presented a suspended menace—“without streetlights, without shops, without gas, without moving vehicles … its walls in ruins … its dark streets deserted.” The spectacle was “like nothing ever seen before” (737, a21a,1), and yet, as Victor Hugo observed, it was utterly common, the normative condition, in fact, of a public sphere shaped by and inured to its own traumatic history. What was Paris? Hugo asked. “It was an inhabited place where there was nobody, it was a desert place where there was somebody”—a crowded boulevard and a graveyard (424, M3a,6). It was the indelible signature of the empty place. Benjamin’s well-known treatment of urban spaces relies on the reverberating shocks generated by this political zone of contention. In “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire,” the sole publication on political categories extracted from his research notes, Benjamin argued that modernity itself was the source of trauma, throwing off electrostatic jolts that had to be discharged lest the energies become devastating (SW 4:319). The street depicted in Poe’s story “The Man of the Crowd” was a chief source of danger. As the narrator takes in the scene, with its serried ranks of gentlemen, office workers, and laborers, he sees a latent violence barely constrained by the common flow, “like the energy from a battery” (328) constantly winding down. In Poe’s story, the anonymous old man wandering aimlessly in public spaces reminiscent of Hugo’s empty city is stalked by the narrator who, in seeking out the mysterious source of his fascination, comes to share in his subject’s “deep crime.”33 The aimless mise-en-scène, to use Lefort’s term, serves as an allegory for Benjamin’s own hermeneutic procedure. Just as Baudelaire makes his way through

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“deserted” streets to wrest a “hidden constellation” (4:321), so Benjamin collects the artifacts of an empty place crowded with the remains of revolution. Here we can see the difference between Benjamin’s idealized collector and the allegorical behavior of the historical materialist. The collector, Benjamin wrote in “Paris, Capital of the Nineteenth Century,” “dreams his way not only into a distant or bygone world but also into a better one” (SW 3:39) where objects and subjects are magically freed to assume ideal relations—the constituents of truth forecast in Benjamin’s “Epistemo-Critical Prologue.” By contrast, the skeptical gaze of the allegorist cannot be explained apart from “the passionate, distraught concern with this spectacle” (Arcades 211, H4a,1). The political field of the empty place, like the crowded, anonymous streets of Poe’s story, is the area of dialectical exchange and disciplinary excess, the theater of clashing interests and barely suppressed violence that characterized mid-century France and that preoccupied the flâneur, himself an allegorist, who figures the untrammeled work of the intellect. Like the flâneur, Benjamin attempts to secure a studied insulation from the scene he surveys, positioning himself, as it were, on a street corner, halfway between the collector and the figure of Baudelaire. Yet the protracted course of his research would become increasingly narrow and, like a forbidden frontier, ultimately impassible. In this regard, as Lefort claims, the empty place was never far from its violent political origins. Benjamin liked to say that criticism was a form of demolition. His model for the historical materialist was not the archaeologist, carefully extracting artifacts after recording and removing their integument, but the incendiary, a kind of explosives expert who blasted, attacked, or otherwise assaulted historical contexts to liberate their abiding essence. The ruins he discovered in Baroque allegory became, in their own right, a figure for his methodological goals. Yet there was an ironic—one might say dialectical— contradiction in this stance, since to commandeer materials comprising the empty place was to reproduce the attitude of the committed partisan in the discursive struggle Laclau details. Benjamin’s explosive archive was strategic, and his desire to achieve the effect of a nuclear reaction (as he once told Ernst Bloch) suggests the latent violence, the “shock,” of the entire field (463; N3,4). His assertion of sovereignty in and through his materials—whether the arbitrary sovereignty of the collector or the sympathetic sovereignty of the flâneur—made Benjamin’s project identical to that of other political critics like Karl Marx, whose work was “expressive”

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of his times (460; N1a,7). Benjamin’s critique of Paris was inseparable from the city’s trauma. This dialectic of sovereignty and sympathy, the attempt to master, express, and induce shock, is evident in the mixed modes of Benjamin’s analysis. Large segments of his notes deal in opposing figures or characters that convey the political, representational, and experiential elements of what, after Laclau, one might term modes of articulation. One prominent example involves the opposition between the ragpicker and the urban planner Georges-Eugène Haussmann. The ragpicker, like Poe’s man of the crowd, is sui generis. He cannot be considered a member of the bohème, the conspiratorial class that underwrote Louis-Napoléon’s rise (although Marx includes him in this rabble). Nor can he be associated with the flâneur, although his investment in debris is akin to the flâneur’s sympathetic association with commodities—and, for that matter, to the acquisitive cultural critic’s. Yet “everyone … could recognize a bit of himself in the ragpicker” (SW 4:8), for whom the endless tide of trash, gathered meticulously in public places, was a kind of inert counterpart to the urban crowds. The ragpicker’s intimacy with the currents and effects of modernity is offset by the interventions of Haussmann, who literally created the empty places that Daudet and Hugo captured in their panoramas. As Benjamin provocatively claims, Haussmann’s purpose was not to establish Paris in all its Beaux Arts splendor; it was to respond to the “emergency regime” of the June Insurrection by instituting a dictatorship of the streets through boulevards too wide for barricades yet spacious enough for the movement of troops. Haussmann became a sovereign dictator whose chief purpose was “to secure the city against civil war” (SW 3:42). His principles are synoptic and authoritarian, embodying a symbolic imperative in which all scenes register the same governing impulse. And yet, such noxious “absolutism” (144, E11a,1) could not be divorced from the scholar’s critical gaze, in that Haussmann’s urban demolition, like Benjamin’s blasting, turned Paris into a panopticon of sweeping vistas afforded to all those who knew where to stand. Benjamin was imparting a representation of his own methodology, in which the ragpicker’s collection of objects from a debris field dovetailed with the desire to name, organize, and control that endeavor. The revolutionary and the absolutist met in the wide avenues of the empty place. One might understand this internally divided field of vision as Benjamin’s response to the challenge of reification that he found in Lukács. That challenge involved the status of the critical observer who could not

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be preserved from the punitive effects of experience. Just like the Marxist or the flâneur, the critic was subject to the distorting conditions of ideology and capital—conditions that Benjamin’s critical demolition was designed to oppose but that it could not entirely eradicate. “Criticism is a matter of correct distancing,” he had written in One-Way Street (1928). “Now things press too urgently on human society. The ‘unclouded,’ ‘innocent’ eye has become a lie” (SW 1:476).34 Both criticism and critique presupposed an illusory isolation not to be overcome through language alone. Benjamin’s solution in the Arcades Project was to place Haussmann’s sovereign impulse in constant dialectical tension with the activities of the ragpicker, whose pragmatic and incessant collecting unearthed shifting constellations that exposed the structural configurations of the empty place. Such configurations—montages, feuilletons, shop windows, panoramas, and the arcades themselves—disclosed in Benjamin’s hands the material relations of the regime (in Lefort’s sense of the word)—changed the shocks of encounter into the shock of recognition. But this recognition did not merely confirm the sovereign gaze; it challenged and disrupted it, as allegorical representation disrupts symbolic closure. In that sense, cultural criticism, much like Haussmann’s boulevards, was in a constant state of ruin and repair. This dialectic grounds Benjamin’s political phenomenology. One can see the dialectic in the complex relation between the flâneur, the urban exhibition, and the bourgeois household. As Benjamin argues, the flâneur was the literal embodiment of the urban “physiologies,” those botanizing accounts of urban life displayed as if in a diorama or a waking dream. Physiologies attempted to impose order on urban chaos by cataloguing its recurrences and forms. Just as the genre, with its “variety and inexhaustible wealth of permutations,” also exposed the political “despotism” governing its field (SW 4:19), so the flâneur absorbs this panoply with a sensitivity that both registers and surpasses his experience. Unlike the physiologies, locked into a “gray” rendition of fixed forms (SW 4:19), the flâneur is free, mobile—but a mobility that is not tied, like the ragpicker, to exploiting the commodities he encounters. Although he demonstrates the “empathetic … sou[l]” of commodities themselves (31), the flâneur circulates in a manner oddly detached from the crowd that he may enter and leave at will. His freedom of movement, tethered as he is to a reifying world, is like the freedom of thought itself. That freedom stands in sharp contrast to the phantasmagoric displays of exhibition halls, which educate the masses in the means of the market, yet it also distinguishes the

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flâneur from the proprietor of the bourgeois home, in which commodities become fetishistic objects carefully deposited in etuis or display cases in overstuffed rooms, as if objects had invaded the mind. Such interiors betray the primitive psychology of reification, yet they also contribute to a political stance since, as Benjamin insists, the Parisian home rests on a subterranean stream of sewage. The bourgeois, like the spectator of the world’s fair, retreats behind an urban barricade, but the enclosure is always compromised, corrupted, and exposed. These configurations—the political enmities of regime change inscribed in the representations and experiences of an urban world marked by exception—suggest a mobile yet critical phenomenology. From a point of abstraction putatively above the conflict, Benjamin casts a commanding gaze on the empty places of Paris, reading in their clashing imperatives the signs of a contested regime. His historical materialism preserves him from the errors of a purely discursive imperative demonstrated by philosophical critics like Laclau; his emphasis on the rich ambiguities in the state of exception allows him to avoid the schematic thinking of a political analyst like Schmitt. Benjamin’s political phenomenology attempts to reproduce, in its massive accumulations and flows, the crowded world of Paris itself, held together in all its unruly sympathy by the disciplinary excess that Laclau discerned in post-foundational polities. This is the world of unrestrained liberalism foreseen by James Madison in Federalist No. 10, an order in which factions and coalitions clash and merge in a kind of steady but evolving political state mirrored, as his contemporary Adam Smith proclaimed, in the operations of capital. But the state of exception, like economic crisis or civil war, disabused Benjamin of any recourse to stasis, political or otherwise. Instead, the movements of critical thought itself reproduced the experience of history by imposing a disciplinary excess— the Arcades Project—that, in its failed attempts at closure, violently reappropriated materials as if acting the part of a divine sovereign upending the world. His interdisciplinarity embodied exception. Benjamin’s inability to wrest a monumental tome from his materials, that is to say, may not have been caused by insecurity, poverty, or professional distraction; the incompleteness may itself have been the message. In his final reflections on method, Benjamin recognized that even the dialectical symmetry of his fourfold method was contingent, and that contingency alone was the principle of order. Benjamin’s definitive dialectical model appears in “On the Concept of History” (1940), the last essay he wrote before his death. It was here that

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he inserted his great statement, drawn from the Arcades notes, that “There is no document of culture which is not at the same time a document of barbarism” (SW 4:392). The barbarity of his own time had cast a shadow over all—even critical thought, permanently altered by the state of exception: The tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the “state of emergency” in which we live is not the exception but the rule [daß der “Ausnahmezustand,” in dem wir leben, die Regel ist]. We must attain to a conception of history that accords with this insight. Then we will clearly see that it is our task to bring about a real state of emergency. The current amazement that the things we are experiencing are “still” possible is not philosophical. This amazement is not the beginning of knowledge—unless it is the knowledge that the view of history which gives rise to it is untenable. (392)

The present state of emergency in Paris was not merely an occasion; it was a condition, an enduring caesura. To combat fascism, Benjamin asserts, one must recognize that every insight is menaced by a “danger [that] threatens both the content of tradition and those who inherit it” (391). The remedy is to adopt a stance that admits the dialectical danger of all thought, its investment not in an instrumental violence designed to liberate the past, but, as the phenomenologist James Dodd suggests, in an existential violence inseparable from the operations of history. If, as Dodd maintains, “the violence we seek to understand” is “determined by the violence of intelligibility,”35 then only a mind steeped in barbarism can bring the past to bear. Benjamin suggests the revolutionary nature of his stance in a slyly subversive anecdote. There was once an “automaton” that simulated a master chess player (Fig. 2.1). Dressed in “Turkish attire,” the puppet mysteriously and flawlessly moved the pieces against any opponent. The mechanism was invisible, and the object appeared to be human in both thought and action. The real master, as Benjamin revealed, possibly drawing on a similar account by Poe, was a “hunchbacked dwarf” concealed in a narrow drawer, who guided the puppet’s movements. “The puppet, called ‘historical materialism,’” Benjamin concludes, “is to win all the time,” defeating all comers so long as “it enlists the services of theology” (389). Sovereign thought, it would appear, involves the mastery of the real sources of movement and change, a subterranean understanding of the

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Fig. 2.1  Joseph Racknitz, Ueber den Schachspieler des Herrn von Kempelen und Dessen Nachbildung. (Leipzig and Dresden: J.  G. I.  Breitkopf, 1789, p.  67; https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Racknitz_-­_The_Turk_3.jpg)

motives of history. Historical materialism peers into the inner life of things, and thus restores the life of the mind. Yet, like so much of Benjamin’s late work, this image is resonantly dialectical—indeed, it conveys what he calls “dialectic at a standstill,” that moment in thought, “saturated in tensions,” revealing its own disciplinary excess (Arcades 475, N10a3). Is Benjamin suggesting that the game is foolproof or that it is rigged? If historical materialism revives a neglected theology, and thus sovereignty itself—think of Schmitt’s political theology—why is its vehicle a carnival doll, an object of ethnic ridicule, and its agent a stunted hand? Benjamin’s metaphor of the chessboard implies a

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strategy of subversion, anticipating his comment in Thesis VI that “Every age must strive anew to wrest tradition away from the conformity that is working to overpower it” (391), but that subversive strategy is compromised by the automaton, manipulated by a misfit concealed in a dusty recess. Any facile appropriation of the past, even a “winning” one underwritten by historical materialism, seems a cruel illusion. But the figure may also conceal a formula for a revolutionary criticism. If the player, like the game itself, is marked by the state of exception governing reason, then every move is an expression of danger. Chess, a parlor version of battle, is a perfect metaphor for this process, in which each dialectical position may annihilate an opponent. But a winning strategy— even a defensive violence—does not escape the menacing rules of the game. Such conditions literally translate the sovereignty of thought into material form. Yet the metaphor is still more compelling, for Benjamin’s rigged game also signals a way to master the state of exception by incorporating it into the very texture of thought. Consider a radical transformation of chess. In the conventional game, every one of the seemingly infinite encounters is governed by an explicit structure of rules dictating the positions and motions, the physics, of each piece. Now imagine a game in which each move changes the governing structure, challenges the rules by suspending them so that the game is radically altered, the rules renewed at every turn. In this context, sovereignty is both powerful and impotent, since its effects are repeatedly canceled and redefined through dialectical action. Such a game, experienced through continuous displacement and exchange, would, of course, be impossible to play, impossible to win. But if thought could be rendered sensitive enough to its own constant impositions and aggressions, even as it used these motives to grasp its object, it would have mastered a truly revolutionary strategy. Mastery would no longer be an object of thought, but the apprehension of its ever-changing modes. In that ceaseless negation, Benjamin conceives the possibility of freedom. American writers of the extended early republic had already grasped this freedom in making the state of exception a model for their own critical work. Like Benjamin, the writers I will survey in the chapters ahead attempted to apply the movements and contradictions of history to the very texture of their prose. Although they all operate in mixed modes of articulation, these writers, marginalized by status, disposition, or the eccentric course of their careers, are keenly sensitive to the exceptions and disruptions that frame their work. In effect, each of the four authors, or

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groups of authors, highlights one element of Benjamin’s fourfold method. Poe was preoccupied with the historical—the conflicts of sovereignty and contingency, rooted in race, that exposed the barbarism and horror of American life. Ex-slave narrators like Moses Roper and Henry Bibb explored an abiding trauma through their enforced experience of reification—the haunting necessity to apprehend the self as a thing. Melville engaged the mode of allegory, treating the crisis over popular sovereignty in Kansas as a means to examine the nation’s tortuous political representations. But it is Dickinson, whose principal work emerged during civil war, who is most concerned with the political crisis of enmity and purity that Benjamin appropriated from Schmitt’s account of exception. If Benjamin imagined criticism as crisis, his American precursors saw in their violent era a premise for their uniquely critical art.

Notes 1. For Oregon, see these contemporaneous sites: (a) h  ttps://www.oregon.gov/gov/admin/Pages/eo_20-­59.aspx#:~: text=On%20March%208%2C%202020%2C%20I%20issued%20 Executive%20Order%2020%2D,%2C%20through%20May%20 7%2C%202,020. [3/8/20]; (b) h  ttps://www.fireengineering.com/2020/07/20/490950/ portland-­protesters-­gassed-­after-­setting-­fire-­at-­courthouse/#gref [7/20/20]; (c) h  ttps://www.courthousenews.com/i-­k now-­h ow-­t o-­c over-­a -­ portland-­protest-­so-­why-­am-­i-­shaking/ [7/21/20]; (d) h  ttps://www.courthousenews.com/portland-­protests-­violence-­ from-­federal-­police/ [7/21/20]; https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/katebubacz/portland-­ protest-­photos [7/23/20]; (e) h  ttps://constitutioncenter.org/interactive-­constitution/podcast/ portland-­federal-­forces-­and-­the-­first-­amendment [7/30/20]; (f) h  ttps://cpj.org/2020/08/were-­s cared-­s hitless-­o ut-­h ere-­f our-­ reporters-­on-­covering-­the-­federal-­response-­to-­portland-­protests/ [8/19/20]; (g) https://www.opb.org/article/2020/09/25/oregon-­gov-­kate-­ brown-­d eclares-­e mergency-­i n-­p ortland-­a s-­p roud-­b oys-­r ally-­ approaches/ [9/25/20]; (h) h  ttps://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/25/us/portland-­p roud-­ boys-­antifa-­protests.html [9/25/20];

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(i) h  ttps://www.courthousenews.com/portland-­p olice-­c laim-­n ear-­ daily-­force-­doesnt-­violate-­court-­order/ [10/22/20]; (j) h  ttps://www.oregonlive.com/news/2020/05/portland-­mayor-­ ted-­wheeler-­declares-­state-­of-­emergency-­after-­destructive-­protests-­ imposes-­curfew.html [10/30/20]. For Michigan, see. (a) h  ttps://www.michigan.gov/whitmer/0,9309,7-387-90499_ 90705-540,837--,00.html [3/10/20]; (b) h  ttps://www.motherjones.com/coronavirus-­updates/2020/04/ lansing-­michigan-­capitol-­protests-­stay-­at-­home-­order-­whitmer/ [4/30/20]; (c) h  ttps://www.wxyz.com/news/coronavirus/michigan-­militia-­puts-­ armed-­protest-­in-­the-­spotlight [5/2/20]; (d) h  ttps://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Politics/2020/0504/Guns-­ in-­Michigan-­Capitol-­Defense-­of-­liberty-­or-­intimidation [5/4/20]; (e) h  ttps://www.theguardian.com/us-­news/2020/apr/30/michigan-­ protests-­coronavirus-­lockdown-­armed-­capitol [5/2/20]. (f) https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/09/us/politics/michigan-­ state-­capitol.html [5/20/21]. For a more general appraisal of pandemic protests see also Paolo Gerbaudo, “The Pandemic Crowd: Protest in the Time of Covid-19,” Journal of International Affairs 73 (2020): 61–75; and Rogers Brubaker, “Paradoxes of Populism During the Pandemic,” Thesis Eleven 164 (2021): 73–87 (accessed April 12, 2021). 2. Jakub Šrola, Eva Ballová Mikuškováa, and Vladimíra Čavojová, “When we are Worried, What are We Thinking: Anxiety, Lack of Control, and Conspiracy Beliefs Amidst the Covid-19 Pandemic,” Applied Cognitive Psychology, February 1, 2021, https://doi.org/10.1002/acp.3798 (Accessed April 12, 2021). 3. Claude Lefort, Democracy and Political Theory, trans. David Macey (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1988), 17. Subsequent citations will be given parenthetically in the text. 4. Lefort’s principal essays may be found in Democracy and Political Theory. For critical discussion of his work, see the essays in Claude Lefort: Thinker of the Political, ed. Martin Plot (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013); Natalie Doyle, “Democracy as Sociocultural Project of Individual and Collective Sovereignty: Claude Lefort, Marcel Gauchet and the French Debate on Modern Autonomy,” Thesis Eleven 75 (2003): 69–95; James Ingram, “The Politics of Claude Lefort’s Political: Between Liberalism and Radical Democracy,” Thesis Eleven 87 (2006): 33–50; Oliver Marchart, Post-­Foundational Political Thought: Political Difference in Nancy, Lefort,

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Badiou and Laclau (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007), 85–108; and Bernard Flynn, The Philosophy of Claude Lefort: Interpreting the Political (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2005). 5. Natalie Doyle, “Democracy as Sociocultural Project,” 72. 6. On the reconstitution of the King’s body, see also Flynn, Philosophy, 133. 7. Laclau’s principal works include Laclau and Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics (1985), 2nd ed. (London: Verso, 2001); Laclau, On Populist Reason (London: Verso, 2005); The Rhetorical Foundations of Society (London: Verso, 2014); “Why do Empty Signifiers Matter to Politics,” Emancipation(s) (London: Verso, 1996), 36–46; “Democracy and the Question of Power,” Constellations 8 (2001): 3–14; and “The Impossibility of Society,” http://pratiquesdhospitalite.com/wp-­content/uploads/2019/03/laclau.pdf (accessed September 10, 2020). For scholarly discussion of Laclau, see Marchart, Post-Foundational, 134–53; Simon Critchley and Oliver Marchart, ed., Laclau: A Critical Reader (London: Routledge, 2004); Anna Marie Smith, Laclau and Mouffe: The Radical Democratic Imaginary (New York: Routledge, 1998); and Lynn Worsham and Gary Olson, “Hegemony and the Future of Democracy: Ernesto Laclau’s Political Philosophy,” Race, Rhetoric, and the Postcolonial, ed. Gary Olson (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1999), 129–62. On Mouffe, see Martin Beckstein, “The Dissociative and Polemical Political: Chantal Mouffe and the Intellectual Heritage of Carl Schmitt,” Journal of Political Ideologies 16 (2011): 33–51. Citations from Hegemony and Socialist Strategy and On Populist Reason will be given parenthetically in the text. 8. Marchart, Post-Foundational, 2. For a post-foundational reading of Benjamin, see Matthias Fritsch, The Promise of Memory: History and Politics in Marx, Benjamin, and Derrida (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2005), esp. 15, 21. 9. Michael Kaplan, “The Rhetoric of Hegemony: Laclau, Radical Democracy, and the Rule of Tropes,” Philosophy and Rhetoric 43 (2010): 272–73. See also Smith, Laclau and Mouffe, 9. 10. Michael Rogers, “The Development of Carl Schmitt’s Political Thought during the First World War,” Modern Intellectual History 13 (2016): 134. In a curriculum vitae for 1928, Benjamin cites “the contemporary essays of Carl Schmitt, who in his analysis of political phenomena has made a similar attempt to integrate phenomena whose apparent territorial distinctness is an illusion.” As late as 1930, in a letter attending a complimentary copy of his The Origin of German Tragic Drama, Benjamin praised Schmitt’s Dictatorship and “later works,” in which he found “a confirmation of my modes of research in the philosophy of art from yours in the philosophy of the state.” See Horst Bredekamp, Melissa Hause, and Jackson Bond,

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“From Walter Benjamin to Carl Schmitt via Thomas Hobbes,” Critical Inquiry 25 (1999): 249, 250. For general appraisals of Schmitt’s work, see George Schwab, The Challenge of the Exception: An Introduction to the Political Ideas of Carl Schmitt between 1921 and 1936, 2nd ed. (Westport: Greenwood, 1989); and Ellen Kennedy, Constitutional Failure: Carl Schmitt in Weimar (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004), esp. 79–81, 86–90. William Scheuerman provides a sharp critique in Between the Norm and the Exception: The Frankfurt School and the Rule of Law (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1994). Benjamin’s curriculum vitae appears in Selected Writings, vol. 2, pt. 1, ed. Michael Jennings, Howard Eiland, and Gary Smith (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999), 78. 11. Chantal Mouffe, Agonistics: Thinking the World Politically (New York: Verso, 2013), 137–39. For an adaptation and critique of Schmitt’s work, see Mouffe’s “Carl Schmitt and the Paradox of Liberal Democracy,” The Challenge of Carl Schmitt, ed. Mouffe (London: Verso, 1999), 38–53. 12. Among those who argue that a genuine, if fragile constitutional democracy appeared in Germany, especially after 1900, are Mark Hewitson, Germany and the Modern World, 1880–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018); Margaret Anderson, Practicing Democracy: Elections and Political Culture in Imperial Germany (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000); and (to a more limited extent), James Retallack, The German Right, 1860–1920: Political Limits of the Authoritarian Imagination (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2006). See also David Blackbourn, The Long Nineteenth Century: A History of Germany, 1780–1918 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 411–418. Wolfgang Mommsen takes a more critical stance in Imperial Germany, 1867–1918: Politics, Culture, and Society in an Authoritarian State, trans. Richard Daveson (London: Arnold, 1995). For an overview of the Weimar Republic, see Hans Mommsen, The Rise and Fall of the Weimar Democracy, trans. Elborg Forster and Larry Jones (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996). See also Heinrich Winkler, The Age of Catastrophe: A History of the West, 1914–1945 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2015). General information about the period presented in my historical survey is derived from these sources. 13. David Blackbourn, The Long Nineteenth Century, 408, 420–24. 14. Ruth Henig, The Weimar Republic, 1919–1933 (New York: Routledge, 2002), 28. 15. Henig, Weimar Republic, 47; Hans Mommsen, Rise and Fall, 57. 16. Carl Schmitt, Dictatorship: From the Origin of the Modern Concept of Sovereignty to Proletarian Class Struggle, trans. Michael Hoelzl and Graham Ward (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2014), 119. Benjamin discusses “divine violence” in “Critique of Violence,” Selected Writings, vol. 1, ed. Marcus Bullock and Michael Jennings, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996), 250.

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17. Schmitt, Political Romanticism, trans. Guy Oakes (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1986), esp. 91–99. 18. Schmitt, Legality and Legitimacy, trans. Jeffrey Seitzer (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004), 93. Subsequent citations will be given parenthetically in the text. For a reading of Schmitt’s state of exception as a kind of apocalyptic suspension, see Bredekamp et al., “From Walter Benjamin to Carl Schmitt,” esp. 252–53. 19. Schmitt, The Concept of the Political, trans. George Schwab [1927; rev. 1932] (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1976), 32–33. Subsequent citations will be given parenthetically in the text. 20. General information about Benjamin’s career is derived from Howard Eiland, and Michael Jennings, Walter Benjamin: A Critical Life (Cambridge: Belknap Press, 2014); and Bernd Witte, Walter Benjamin: an Intellectual Biography, trans. James Rolleston (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1991). As Matthias Fritsch notes, the tangled and subtle question of Benjamin’s political affiliations has largely been sidelined, in recent years, in favor of deconstructionist and eschatological readings (Promise of Memory, 12–13; see note 26 for examples). Such approaches tend to freeze or suspend Benjamin’s thought in a timeless philosophical order that sees elaboration rather than development, suggesting that Benjamin, from early in his career, was master of a discourse unfolding in ever-expanding constellations. In addition to Fritsch’s study, examinations of the historical and political sensitivity of Benjamin’s work include Margaret Cohen, Profane Illumination; and (in a deliberate attempt to “manhandle” Benjamin) Terry Eagleton, Walter Benjamin, or, Towards a Revolutionary Criticism (London: Verso, 1981) (citation from Preface, xi). For other appraisals of Benjamin’s work, see esp. Richard Wolin, Walter Benjamin: An Aesthetic of Redemption (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982); Susan Buck-Morss, Dialectics of Seeing; Michael Jennings, Dialectical Images; Max Pensky, Melancholy Dialectics: Walter Benjamin and the Play of Mourning (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1993); John McCole, Walter Benjamin and the Antinomies of Tradition (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993); Graeme Gilloch, Walter Benjamin: Critical Constellations (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2002); Samuel Weber, Benjamin’s–abilities (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2008); and Howard Caygill, Walter Benjamin: The Colour of Experience (London: Routledge, 1998). 21. Cavaignac citation in Frederick de Luna, The French Republic under Cavaignac, 1848 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969), 212. For the political situation in France, see also Roger Price, People and Politics in France, 1848–1870 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004); Price, The French Second Empire: An Anatomy of Political Power

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(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001); William Fortescue, France and 1848: The End of Monarchy (London: Routledge, 2005); Howard Payne, The Police State of Louis Napoleon Bonaparte, 1851–1860 (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1966); Richard Burton, Baudelaire and the Second Republic: Writing and Revolution (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991); and Michael Rapport, 1848: Year of Revolution (New York: Basic Books, 2008). On the state of siege in Paris lasting from June 24 to October 12, 1848, see Oren Gross and Fionnuala Ni Aoláin, Law in Times of Crisis, 27. 22. Matthew Truesdell, Spectacular Politics: Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte and the Fête Impérial, 1849–1870 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 5, 36. 23. Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, Marx and Engels: Collected Works, vol. 11, trans. Rodney Livingstone et al., digital edition, http://www.hekmatist.com/Marx%20Engles/Marx%20&%20Engels%20 Collected%20Works%20Volume%2011_%20Ka%20-­%20Karl%20Marx. pdf, 149, accessed February 10, 2021. 24. Citations from Benjamin’s work, excluding The Arcades Project, are from the five-volume Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, ed. Howard Eiland, Michael Jennings, et  al. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996–2003), and will be given parenthetically, by volume and page number, in the text. 25. Georges Sorel, Reflections on Violence, ed. Jeremy Jennings (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 28, 30. 26. Most philosophical assessments of “Critique of Violence” follow Benjamin in seeking a critical vantage point beyond historical experience—a position captured in Julia Ng’s assertion that “historicization might explain the emergence in time of certain forms of legitimated violence, but it thereby does away with the criticizability of violence and the problem of its recognition.” My argument will assert that such a historical and critical standpoint does indeed exist, and must predominate, in thinking through the state of exception as registered in Benjamin’s critical response. See Ng, “Rechtsphilosophie after the War: A Commentary on Paragraphs 4–6 of ‘Zur Kritik der Gewalt,’” Critical Times 2 (2019): 239–51 (citation on p. 243). Other attempts to situate “Critique” beyond history, include Eli Friedlander, “Assuming Violence: A Commentary on Walter Benjamin’s ‘Critique of Violence,” Boundary 2 42 (2015): 173–78 (idealism of language); Howard Eiland, “Deconstruction of Violence,” Boundary 2 44 (2017): 113–140 (idealism of education); Tracy McNulty, “The Commandment against the Law: Writing and Divine Justice in Walter Benjamin’s ‘Critique of Violence,’” Diacritics 37 (2007): 58–59 (idealism of writing); Andrew Benjamin, Working with Walter Benjamin: Recovering a Political Philosophy (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2013),

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94–143 (idealism of justice); and Werner Hamacher, “Afformative, Strike,” trans. Dana Hollander, Cardozo Law Review 13 (1991): 1133–58 (idealism of language and cognition). For a discussion of “Critique” that views it as a response to postwar conditions in Germany, see Fritsch, Promise of Memory, 113–18, 132–34; and Jacques Derrida, “Force of Law,” Cardozo Law Review 11 (1990): 979, 1017. 27. Walter Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, trans. John Osborne (London: Verso, 1998). Citations will be given parenthetically in the text. 28. See Die Diktatur: Von den Anfängen des modernen Souveränitätsgedankens bis zum proletarischen Klassenkampf, 8th ed. (Berlin: Duncker and Humblot, 2015), xvi; and Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften, ed. Rolf Tiedemann and Hermann Schweppenhäuser (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1974), 1, part 1: 245. 29. Georg Lukács, History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics, trans. Rodney Livingstone (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1971). Citations will be given parenthetically in the text. On reification and Benjamin, see also Eagleton, Walter Benjamin, 28–31, 35–36. 30. Fredric Jameson argues that Benjamin demonstrates a fourfold allegorical method, evoking psychological, moral, religious, and eschatological levels. However, his broad analysis consigns Benjamin’s absorption in the material elements of history and culture to a largely non-dialectical nostalgia for a waning engagement with the sacred. See Marxism and Form: Twentieth-­ Century Dialectical Theories of Literature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971), 60, 76. 31. Susan Buck-Morss, The Dialectics of Seeing, 66. 32. Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999), 1:100 [C9a,1]. All citations will be drawn from volume 1, and will be given parenthetically in the text, providing both page number and Benjamin’s file notation. 33. Edgar Allan Poe, “The Man of the Crowd,” Graham’s Magazine 7 (1840): 270. 34. For a discussion of this problematic in the Arcades Project, see Cohen, Profane Illumination, 23–25, 51, 217–26, 248–56. Cohen cites One-Way Street on 251. 35. James Dodd, Phenomenological Reflections on Violence: A Skeptical Approach (New York: Routledge, 2017), 7.

CHAPTER 3

Empty Places

However the American Revolution is interpreted—as a radical break from or as an attempt to redeem the past—the political mechanisms it set in motion have been generally viewed as seamless and uniform. While historians have debated the ideological effects of the Founding, often through a clash of republican and liberal principles, there is a consensus that the durable framework of the Constitution has guided and contained America’s political fortunes. By investing dynamic power in the people and its agencies, the framers displaced conflict from the field of contending regimes to that of contending representations, as competing constituencies vied for inclusion and power. In this respect, and despite the influence of globalism on contemporary theory, the American polity is treated as an exception: having cast off an absolutist past, the nation gradually refined, often with great sacrifice and considerable violence, an enduring democratic alternative. This chapter will argue that, at least until the end of the Civil War, the United States was in very much the same position as post-Napoleonic France, contending with radically different senses of the polity. Although the conflict, in due course, focused on slavery, the inciting cause involved a clash over authority and its enforcement centered on opposing versions of police power. In its broadest sense, the term “police” indicates not a function of discipline, as in municipal police, but its essence—a means of conceiving the disposition of obligations and forces comprising what Claude Lefort calls a “regime.” Hence, there were both an absolutist © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 J. Fichtelberg, Exceptional Violence and the Crisis of Classic American Literature, American Literature Readings in the 21st Century, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-07845-3_3

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version of police power still active in the nineteenth century and an emerging democratic alternative. In the United States, these regimes, imposed and harnessed by the Constitution in the domains of state and federal sovereignty, created a series of structural imbalances that sectionalism ultimately clarified but did not originate. Rather, the anxieties, aggressions, and utopian possibilities of police power came to dominate the empty place of contest in the extended early republic—a contest magnified and complicated by the relative weakness of the federal government. In recurrent periods of emergency occasioned by such disparities—in what I have been calling states of exception—the antithetical meanings of police power were fought through, if not resolved. Indeed, the contest over police regimes was not effectively settled until the twentieth century, when the contours of the national police state clearly emerged. America’s new global position allowed it to embrace absolutist principles of police power, even as it celebrated its domestic experience as a fortunate and protected democratic exception. It was a shrewd French aristocrat, Alexis de Tocqueville, who first detailed the true dimensions of the problem. * * * Alexis de Tocqueville was not the first writer to confront the paradox of American political development, but he was among the most prescient. Touring the nation amid the upheavals of Jacksonian democracy and market revolution, he recognized that the new nation had managed to avoid the class and social conflicts of Europe by diffusing and disguising power. In a land of rampant equality, he claimed, Americans had already experienced their radical break with the past, and were now “march[ing] in unison toward the same end.”1 Central state power in this new regime, the absolutist influences responsible for recurrent crises in Europe, was all but invisible in an American polity where the federal government itself was “only an exception” (1:98). Democratic towns, at once the focus of “the ordinary relations of life,” the “desire for esteem,” and the contests of “real interests,” absorbed Americans so completely that the sovereign Union became “a nearly ideal being,” without substance or presence in the mind (1:112). And yet the French aristocrat sensed a strange absolutism in this local life arising from a legal presence so dense that it rivaled the police powers of the ancien régime. “[T]he law gets into the smallest details,” he claimed, “simultaneously prescrib[ing] the principles and the means to apply them” and wrapping citizens in a web of “strict and

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rigorously defined obligations” (1:120). “Americans believe that … social power must emanate directly from the people,” Tocqueville later observed; yet “once this power is constituted, they imagine … no limits for it; they readily recognize that it has the right to do everything” (2:1197). The glare of local law obscured the power and the purpose of an emergent federal regime. And yet the innumerable intensities of a local power that Tocqueville called “police regulations,” capable of everything and anything, might well create an imperialism of their own. Such structures starkly defined the lives of the enslaved, in many ways the most thoroughly regulated Americans. These victims of “tyranny” and “[o]ppression” (1:517), Tocqueville thought, helped to clarify the inner logic of democracy. Popular sovereignty, it seemed, could not be achieved without servitude.2 Tocqueville’s insight into the disruptive effects of local law and his trenchant yet limited recognition of the contradictions of slavery go to the heart of a debate that still engrosses his successors. When and how did national order and discipline arise? Was the course of the extended early republic a Hegelian unfolding of an inner dynamic, the realization of democracy, equality, and modernity through inherent, if contested laws? Or was it a formula for a new despotism unleashed on those who threatened limitless desire? These alternatives are often posed within a broader calculus that emphasizes either an institutional logic revealing its rational course or a clash of local antagonists resisting federal order or alienated by the national contract. Yet even proponents of the latter, so-called weak state model of American political development generally view the antebellum era as a relatively stable regime—in Claude Lefort’s sense of a democratic order that had rejected absolutism and was wrestling with issues of governmentality, not principle. Everyone agreed that self-government and the people’s sovereignty were desirable and necessary; the question was who would rule, and how—a question to be sorted out by the nation’s innumerable and would-be sovereigns. Here, too, Tocqueville may have been prescient, for his synoptic portrait of the new American regime was cross-cut and threatened by the very energies it generated, the limitless expressions of sovereignty that the system both regulated and released. Local ordinances could attempt to control these energies, but it was the formidable, apparently untrammeled power of local sovereignty that generated that very order. American democracy was thus menaced by a principle of excess tied to its revolutionary origin. The people could very well be consumed by their power.

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This chapter will argue that the extended early republic was the scene— in Lefort’s sense—of a besetting contest over the power, presence, and situation of an emergent police state. The term “police,” as I will use it, is broader than the application that Walter Benjamin offered in “Critique of Violence,” although the expanded sense is related to his overall project. There Benjamin argued that institutional police were ad hoc legislators, wielding violence to suture gaps in the law. Police power, he claimed, is “formless, … all-pervasive, ghostly”—and thus a menace to democratic principles (SW 1:243). But the governmental aims of Tocqueville’s police are even more radical and extensive. Police science—Polizeiwissenschaft— emerged in the Baroque era as a response, in part, to the devastation of the Thirty Years’ War. A tool of absolutism anticipating the bureaucratic discipline of secular states, police science was also a utopian vision of order in which all the modes and purposes of a society were marshaled to promote security, prosperity, and happiness. Transferred to America through English common law, the “internal police,” as Tocqueville recognized, provided a powerful means of order in the colonies and their successor states—an order, as many scholars have argued, eventually transferred to the nation at large. Understood in these terms, the American variant of police power suggests a Hegelian principle in which a central motive gradually assumes mastery. Yet this guarantor of security and order, I will argue, was inextricably tied to insecurity and disorder through its very need to be all-encompassing. The comprehensive, system-building vision of the police-, or policy-impulse was premised on the recognition, and the fear, that no regimen could eliminate insecurity and that, indeed, insecurity was essential to authority. Crime and chaos not only impelled but also legitimated the police, endorsing its indispensable violence. In the United States, these were not abstract premises. They were tied to two clashing versions or applications of police procedure associated with the master forces of antebellum political life: Southern slavery and the benevolent empire. Southern apologists for slavery, intimately tied to the instabilities of a global market that made or marred their fortunes, developed a paternalist police model, coincident with the patriarchal roots of police science, that governed their politics yet intensified their sense of insecurity. Their protests over state sovereignty and their mounting paranoia over slave rebellions and Northern betrayal were expressions of a fear of contagion arising from the possession and abuse of slaves. Ironically, their abolitionist opponents, fired by the evangelical necessity to purge sin, were driven by the same motives: a sense of insecurity to which their own version of a

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national, moral police was an urgent response. Interpreting political struggle as sin, they wrestled with the need to cleanse the nation in a milieu where annihilation often seemed the only response to impurity. The pursuit of an ever-receding perfection drove their desire for order. Expressed in these terms, my use of the term “police” with regard to the sectional crisis may appear to be little more than assigning a new term to a very old story. Yet my claim is somewhat broader: that the story itself is strained and distorted, and that the politics of the extended early republic cannot be recovered without its revision. For if both sides in the contest over slavery were availing themselves of presumably democratic means in the public sphere, there remained in American politics an essential distrust and fear of those means associated with the operation of influence. This term, I will argue, fiercely debated during the ratification era yet never resolved in relation to political action, figured as the evil twin of the enlightened public sphere, revealing the treacherous pull of oratorical and political power that could sway and corrupt auditories or republics. Central to the operation of democratic politics, both target and tool of Jacksonian operatives and their opponents, “influence” was intimately tied to the vision of a police order that imagined itself beset by noxious conditions and subjects—many not yet citizens—that had to be disciplined, curtailed, or destroyed. Action was an urgent necessity, yet purgation was impossible—a dialectic that drove national politics to extremes during the antebellum era. Each constituency, that is to say, was striving for what Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe termed “hegemony”—prevalence amid the contest of ardent positions in a discursive and material field. Yet there is clearly a difference between Laclau’s utopian version of hegemony, or influence, in On Populist Reason and the scene of the antebellum era, in which political dialogue and exchange were increasingly destructive. Such scenes were magnified, their insecurities and violence exposed, during states of exception. The extended early republic thus wrestled with, but could not resolve, the problems of influence and sovereignty in the empty place of democratic exchange. Yet the responses and formulations it developed would be crucial to a genuine regime change well under way by the end of the nineteenth century: the transition from a scene dominated by internal police, as in Tocqueville’s model, to a police state, in which states of exception—eras of violent disruption and insecurity—grounded federal sovereignty. Exception would become critical to order. Broadly speaking, the antebellum era provided the foreground for that transition during ramified crises of sovereignty experienced as states of

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exception. In these periods, challenges to police power proved most intense yet most elusive. At territorial borders, during financial and market panics, and under conditions of revolt or rumored revolt, the patterns of sovereignty and control that had worked locally or nationally began to break down. The antebellum era experienced three such periods: the years from 1829 to 1833—roughly the era of Tocqueville’s sojourn—encompassing the birth of the abolitionist movement, the Nat Turner rebellion, the Georgia Indian Removal cases argued before the U.S. Supreme Court, and the Nullification crisis; the decade of instability stemming from the Panic of 1837 and extending to the Mexican War; and the territorial crisis surrounding Kansas and its aftermath from 1854 to the eve of disunion. In each period, clashing imperatives surrounding police, influence, insecurity, and the very nature of the polity drove public discussion and action, yet no resolution emerged—precisely because the antagonists used the same terms to such opposite purposes. In effect, opponents were demonstrating the reverse of Laclau’s discursive model—that equivalential chains, those applications of apposite impulses and purposes, intensified disruption. Such confusion and disorder demand a reading different from either the Hegelian or the populist model, one that emphasizes the intrinsically dialectical texture of the era. Hence I will examine each crisis, and the literature attending it, in relation to Benjamin’s political phenomenology, the array of historical, political, representational, and material effects that acutely characterize a democracy confronting states of exception occasioned by its investment in slaves. Significantly, it was at the margins of these conflicts—at the borders of the borders—that the nature and shape of exception were most visible. That dangerous yet promising region provided the fierce haven in which the writers I survey in the coming chapters would take their stand. For these cultural critics and victims, exception alone proved liberating. * * * When and how did America become America? A dominant strain in antebellum historiography argues that the United States was a dissociated republic. Beyond the sectionalism that would tear the nation apart, lived experience of Americans was one of ruptures and fragments, not unified wholes. Numerous readings support this thesis. Antebellum Americans were gripped by a market revolution pitting agrarians against entrepreneurs. Radical changes in technology and transportation displaced or

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propelled workers, and financial panics exacted huge tolls. Not only were Americans jolted by the present; they were increasingly divorced from the past. Established churches waned; local control yielded to regional disparity. Sons and families migrated, as immigrants overwhelmed cities. Bondspeople and Native Americans endured murderous discipline and dispossession. To many, the entire nation seemed suddenly awash in sin. It was an age of transformation, historians maintain, of opening, of disaffection and risk.3 Sean Wilentz captures the disruptions in his massive account of democracy from “Jefferson to Lincoln.” “Americans of the early nineteenth century lived in a different universe,” he claims, inhabited a republican milieu that endorsed the power of social institutions to promote happiness and order. The antebellum era saw the dissolution of that faith over the crisis of slavery, a crisis promoting two “distinct political systems as well as bodies of thought.”4 From this perspective, sectional strife was as much a symptom of the rupture as its principal cause. The unstated premise in many of these assessments is the role and the failure of sovereignty, both personal and political. American federalism, with its distinctive power sharing, arguably magnified the ruptures of the antebellum era through the divided responses Wilentz describes. While the federal government exercised power over commerce, territories, diplomacy, and taxation, federal government reserved most power to the states and set the stage for civil war. Hence the sharpest evidence of rupture during this period involves the collapse of the central state over the issue of slavery. Here, John Brooke provides a telling assessment. The early American polity was, in effect, a “composite” state—a successor and inheritor of the British colonial system delegating relative autonomy to its far-­ flung members. A brief interregnum of centrist government during the Federalist era gradually gave way to the atavistic composite form, now intensified by sectional antagonism and evangelical fervor. Two forms of policing, Brooke suggests, filled the gap left by absent federal sovereignty: a redoubled coercive regime, the “internal police,” through which Southern localities secured their property in slaves, and an enthusiastic moral regime that made slavery its chief target. A weak central state both suborned and sanctioned this volatile order.5 This sweeping account has recently incited a counter-narrative emphasizing America’s strong state origins. Influential here has been the work of sociologist Michael Mann, who, in his exhaustive The Sources of Social Power argues for a matrix of features characterizing strong states, including the capacity to assert sovereignty through a network or

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“infrastructure” of “radial institutions.”6 Seen in these terms, the federal government of the United States was strong by design, through the modest yet distinctive array of delegated powers establishing a basis for central authority. The claim has incited a scholarly industry detailing every aspect of what Brian Balogh calls “a government out of sight,” including the early republic’s administrative triumphs through such agencies as the post office, the army, the courts, the General Land Office, and the Bureau of Indian Affairs.7 Overarching and providing theoretical warrant for this new institutionalism has been the study of the law. Legal scholars like William Novak, Christopher Tomlins, and Markus Dubber have argued that the American strong state derived from its commitment to strong law. Throughout the extended early republic, the analogical rationality of the law propelled the state to assume ever more expansive functions stemming from its disciplinary array, often by means of the commerce clause, the disposition of territories, and its treaty-making powers. The theoretical rationale for these assertions lay in what Novak terms the salus populi tradition—“the people’s welfare”—and Dubber, applying a centuries-old rubric, simply calls “the police power.”8 For early modern Europeans and their American successors, police science grounded Mann’s prescriptions for the central state. From its inception, the police power provided a vision of administrative and legal authority applying, as one of its key early expositors, Nicolas Delamare put it, to “the discipline of morals, health, life, public safety and tranquility, roads, science, liberal arts, commerce, manufactures and mechanical arts, servants, laborers, and the poor.” Police power, Michel Foucault aptly observed, echoing Tocqueville, “includes everything.” But though this disciplinary grid may well strike us as totalitarian, the regime was also intended to assert a benign, nurturing, patriarchal sovereignty. In the wake of the Thirty Years’ War, Marc Raeff argues, such capacious surveillance served to “maximiz[e] … all the creative energies and potential resources of a stable and harmonious society,” serving both God and the king.9 The police thus protected the populace against nuisances and threats to health and security, oversaw education, relieved want, maintained commerce and communication. But the police also defended against a long list of enemies, including beggars, prostitutes, aliens, the resistant poor, tricksters, mountebanks, and dissidents. It is not hard to see in this disciplinary grid a blueprint for the surveillance state anatomized by Foucault and the security regime that Mark Neocleous has so richly detailed, in which order and oppression are often indistinguishable.10

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Crucially, in the United States, that order emerged gradually and locally. In The People’s Welfare, Novak exhaustively demonstrates that municipalities and communities in the extended early republic meticulously exercised their oversight powers through what contemporaries called the “internal police.” An early nineteenth-century catalogue of Chicago’s civic duties suggests the range and recursiveness of the enterprise. The city’s responsibilities included the regulation of rivers, harbors, reservoirs, ferries, and sidewalks; the inspection of circuses, theaters, public pumps, and bowling alleys; the cleansing of slaughter houses, brothels, and public pounds; the prevention of kite flying, gambling, hoop rolling, and runaway animals; and the containing of fires, fumes, and explosives.11 As Gary Gerstle argues, the police function of states and localities comprised an authority independent of the constitutionalism that sought to appropriate it, one that, in its project of social discipline, rivaled the coercive powers of the nation state. Those powers are evident in a Massachusetts vagrancy statute targeting “all rogues, vagabonds, and idle persons, … or persons using any subtle craft … fiddlers, runaways, stubborn servants or children; … common night-walkers, pilferers, wanton and lascivious persons.”12 Here, Mann’s regulatory infrastructure seems palpable, and the way to a strong central state all but assured. Indeed, the operations of the internal police shaped the Constitution and its commentators. James Madison himself endured a rigorous course in police science during his tenure in the Virginia House of Delegates. There he and fellow delegates were called upon to settle insurance claims, compensate masters for slaves liberated by the British during the Revolutionary War, and even intervene in a charge of seduction involving a schoolmaster and his young student that reads like a chapter from The Power of Sympathy. When Madison sought to overhaul Virginia’s legal code, his ambitious roster of 117 bills included not only plans for legal reform but also laws to prevent diseased cattle, to license taverns, and to quarantine ships and the remains of mariners who died at sea.13 The term “internal police” resonated throughout the ratification debates over the Constitution—particularly from Antifederalists wary of central state power. The influential “Federal Farmer” warned against the “great … accumulation of powers, especially to the internal police of the country, in a few hands.”14 Mercy Otis Warren railed against the “vaunted police of arbitrary governments” (16:288). So, too, an “Impartial Examiner” demanded that “the internal police” of each state be “left free, sovereign and independent” (8:393). “A Freeman,” writing in the Pennsylvania

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Gazette in 1788, unfurled a long list of sacrosanct police functions insulated from federal interference, including the regulation of rivers, wharves, “gaols,” markets, and “any matter or thing appertaining to the internal affairs of any state, whether legislative, executive or judicial, civil or ecclesiastical” (15:458). Such assertions, whatever the emphasis, provided a common language, a legitimating frame for a broader rationalism as emergency and opportunity pushed the limits of its application. Police science became a template for public action. * * * Impressive as this statist discourse appears, however, there is a weakness in the arguments of Novak, Tomlins, and other new institutionalists, who imagine a diffusionist model subtending strong states. The massive architecture of police science often figures in this scholarship as an evolutionary force inexorably shaping behavior. Tomlins, for example, one of the discipline’s most acute and critical analysts, argues that, by the 1850s, state courts viewed the police “as the signal instance of governance as an autonomous rationality,” a means of imagining “the fullness of state sovereignty.”15 Virtually all strong state theorists assume that federal power displays such an autonomous logic, that governmentality involves the disposition of the governors, not the governed. In part, this is a matter of historical record: the passionate Antifederalist defense of the internal police and their critique of federal power all but evaporated after ratification, as the states resumed their old course of local enforcement and the central state began its inexorable march. But the governors were never so insulated or rational as their expositors claim, nor the governed so tractable. To recognize this discrepancy we must return to the utopian dimension of police science. The vision of an orderly and catalogued polity spread out before the sovereign’s gaze like the streets of Haussmann’s Paris amounts to a disciplinary universe, a plenum in both senses of the word. In its archaic sense, the term “plenum” connotes the sum and container of all physical objects and effects in nature, in contrast to the vacuous æther. In its current sense the term denominates the body of law. Arthur Jacobson nicely captures both senses in describing the legal plenum as a “universe constantly filling with legal materials”—an apt characterization of a police science intent on governing the moral and physical world.16 Here is the “fullness” of Tomlins’s “state sovereignty,” the impulse to anticipate and control any danger, eliminate any emergency. So meticulous was the catalogue, however, so resolute the desire to master

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the innumerable threats—let us call them influences—menacing the people’s welfare, that it is not hard to see a powerful dialectic at work seeking to rid the social body of native dangers, as if excising its genes. Threats would arise, then, not from aberrant behavior, but from inherent behavior. From this perspective the utopian order envisioned by police theorists was less strong than fragile, haunted by risk and insecurity, anxiously warding off insurgency. Impotence and disorder might well be the hallmark of the well-governed state. It is easy to imagine an alternate origin story for the internal police. Catastrophe strikes: a dam bursts, fire rages, disease ravages, and governors take belated but determined steps to avoid a recurrence. A vast table of law arises from the collective experience of trauma and the resolution to seize control. Such a remedy required the collective action of a polity regarding itself as always at risk, menaced by emergency and doubt associated with a sense of imperfection and failure. Mary Douglas likens this impulse to the ritual demand for perfection. [D]isorder,” Douglas asserts, “is unlimited … its potential for patterning … indefinite. … It symbolises both danger and power.” All that is disorganized, uncatalogued, “internal,” threatens the structure that subsumes it, and must subsume it.17 Nancy Jay associates this limitless threat with John Dewey’s term “infinitation”—the sense that every rational choice involves the negation or avoidance of an ever-expanding set of alternatives that menace decision itself. Aristotle’s “Not-A,” the choice not taken, Jay argues, “is without internal boundaries or order of any kind.” Douglas’s term “contagion,” then, is a logically necessary consequence of this structure of formal logic when it is applied directly to the empirical world. Only the excluded middle, the essential empty space between A and Not-A, the “difference” that must be kept between the clean and the unclean, holds the chaos of Not-A at bay.18

The supplement or excess haunting the table of law, the wave of disorder, resistance, and contagion against which sovereigns contend to assure the people’s welfare, is of a piece with the mass of contentious subjects and citizens who not only submit to the law but also dialectically shape it in the empty place. Nowhere was this dialectic more evident than in the critical period of state sovereignty defining the antebellum era, arguably the first great period of American populism. The challenge of slavery, source of both contagion and power, evoked an onslaught of activism and critique that served to heighten the contradictions of the internal police and underscored a parallel menace in the public sphere that subtended law and power: the problem of influence.

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Scholars of early republican politics, following Jürgen Habermas, have argued for the logical power of the public sphere. Viewed as an alternative to absolutist sovereign power, the public sphere was the utopian, late enlightenment project of rational liberty, allowing anonymous commentators to assume the voices of reasoned analysis and criticism in the pursuit of truth. During the ratification era, which exhibited no small share of passionate excess, the essays of Brutus, Publius, and the Federal Farmer, among others, approximated this ideal. Yet the exchange of reason was itself influenced—dialectically opposed—by a hostility to reason on both sides of the debate that precisely mirrored the fear of contagion demonstrated by the internal police and that may be seen as its political expression. Indeed, the term “influence” was one of the most fraught and conflicted of the era. While Montesquieu used it to assess the various emanations of the power of the laws, “influence” often had more disturbing resonances. Applied to the Crown’s manipulation of Parliament, “influence” was deployed by David Hume, with occasional sinister implications, to describe allegedly rational associations of the mind that could easily be seen as contingent or accidental.19 The country advocate Henry St. John, Viscount Bolingbroke saw influence as the prime disease of British politics, a charge that proliferated in America.20 Brutus warned that the corrupt influence affecting royally appointed British judges would be transferred bodily to American federal courts (DHRC 16:431–32), and the Antifederalist Centinel, evoking the trope of corruption, could readily trace the contagion to wealthy insiders like Robert Morris, who used their “predominant influence” to erase personal debts by omitting from Article 6 a provision that sums owed to the United States shall remain “valid” (16:219). Federalists made almost identical charges, assailing the “destructive influence of civil dissention” [sic] (13:286), the “seducing influence” of debtor states like Rhode Island (16:405), and the attempts by the ambitious to “influence” people out of doors (17:195). In a telling phrase, one writer likens such political appeals to “excrementitious discharges” (11:271), corrupting the polity through the very air. Words, no less than people and things, could be annihilating. To be sure, this heightened anxiety was, in part, a response to the times. It is useful to recall that the Constitution itself was written during what many participants, including Madison, likened to a state of exception. The regulators of Shays’s Rebellion were fresh in delegates’ minds; the nation had experienced a sharp economic downturn, and the commercial conference in Annapolis preceding the Constitutional convention had collapsed.

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Madison, in Federalist No. 40, testily defended the new convention, authorized by neither Congress nor the states, by referring to the “exigencies of government and the preservation of the Union,”21 but the discourse of influence is symptomatic of a deeper dynamic disclosed by Walter Benjamin’s political phenomenology. Here we may see the clash of sovereignty and contingency in an empty place, heightened by emergency, driven by a presiding concern for corruption and a corresponding demand for purgation or relief. It was Madison himself who, in Federalist No. 38, likened the nation to a sick patient, complaining that the very tenor of politics during ratification involved a massive, ungovernable excess: This one tells us that the proposed constitution ought to be rejected, because it is not a confederation of the states, but a government over individuals. Another admits that it ought to be a government over individuals, to a certain extent, but by no means to the extent proposed. A third does not object to the government over individuals, or to the extent proposed, but to the want of a bill of rights. A fourth concurs in the absolute necessity of a bill of rights, but contends that it ought to be declaratory not of the personal rights of individuals, but of the rights reserved to the states in their political capacity. (243–44)

We can hear, in this diatribe, the mentality of the Virginia legislator who devised dozens of laws to enforce the internal police—of the slaveowner whose unfinished “Notes on Government” catalogued the challenges of “influence,” including “The Influence of Domestic Slavery.” Virginia, Madison admitted, where bondspeople accounted for nearly 40% of the population, was in fact an aristocracy, not a democracy. “Were the slaves freed,” he noted, with barely suppressed irony, “… the operation of Government might be very different.”22 The point is not to accuse Madison and others of political intemperance or dishonesty but to demonstrate an alternate political model for the extended early republic, one in which the police and contagion, influence and corruption, utopia and infinitation were locked in a tense oppositional coil mutually defining and disruptive. These effects in the empty place of political rivalry were violently magnified after 1830, when the problem of slavery forced the nation to reckon with the costs of its investment in police power. America had been harboring its enemy all along in the figure of the indigenous slave. * * *

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In a landmark decision rendered in 1851, Massachusetts Chief Justice Lemuel Shaw defined the terms and the terrain for a resurgent American police power. In Commonwealth of Massachusetts v. Alger, he ruled on whether a private citizen had the right to extend a wharf in Boston harbor by denying the claimant. The court affirmed that the state had the duty to assert its police powers for the public good—in this instance, to preserve the plenum from commercial violations that would only multiply over time. The problem, Shaw notes, was where to “mark [the] boundaries” of private enterprise” or “prescribe limits” (85) to its actors. Only a police power can define that inchoate domain between freedom and threat, “fixing the distance, within which the use will be prohibited as noxious.”23 Yet, as Benjamin reminds us, the law-preserving police actions of a state are always entangled with a law-making violence attempting to close the numerous gaps in the law’s application and evincing the desire to extend power to all circumstances—to fill the plenum, as Arthur Jacobson would have it. In a federal republic, those boundaries were continually tested, not only in the courts, where judges were impelled to define and contain sovereignty, but also out of doors, where political emergencies, many of them elusive or intractable, forced police functionaries to improvise. In the volatile theater of American politics, these episodes often shifted the balance, however minutely, between state and federal powers, inciting anxieties over influence and infinitation that invited violent responses. Preserving the plenum became ever more treacherous as the claimants to police power multiplied. But there was a difference, I will argue, between the temper of Southern and Northern responses. Although political activists in both sections spoke the common language of police power, the Southern investment in slaves forced activists to define the plenum in increasingly parochial terms. In many instances, they framed their domestic institution through paternalist intimacies that barely concealed their fears of contamination and exposure. They faced the difficult challenge of securing their borders amid insecurity, as if they had staked their claim in a minefield. As sectional conflict intensified and Southern spokesmen watched their political options narrow, they insisted on their insularity, even as they constantly sought opportunities to expand slavery abroad. Northern activists, it may be said, with no insular investment, expressed their drive for hegemony in somewhat different terms. Incited by evangelical fervor, experiencing political action as a scene of intense feeling, they projected their plenary designs not on a region but on an abstract field—on the empty place of

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politics itself. Theirs was an attempt to seize the national discourse, to build transformative equivalential chains. But their ardency was not a function of ideology alone. The confessional impulse in Northern activism, the desire to see politics as the purgation of sin, made their actions all the more urgent. If Southern police responses operated amid insecurity, Northern action occurred within insecurity—within the fluid investments of the self. Ironically, that intensely personal focus prepared the way for a dramatic expansion of police power after the Civil War, as Americans and policy makers came to extend the bounds, and the risks, of influence. The assumptions of American benevolence became a guiding force for American power. Southern slavemasters, most scholars agree, were perpetually on edge. Numerous rebellions and rumored rebellions in the early nineteenth century haunted the South, inciting accesses of vigilance and reform. A heightened police power routinely followed such events—after Gabriel’s Rebellion in Richmond (1800); after Denmark Vesey’s uprising in Charleston (1822); and, with more far-reaching consequences, after Nat Turner’s attack in Virginia’s Southampton County (1831). “[O]ur NEGROES,” declared Edwin C. Holland, “are truly Jacobins of the country [and] … DESTROYERS of our race.”24 William Harper put the matter in terms that anticipated Shaw’s concern with boundaries in Alger: “If a people had on its borders a tribe of barbarians, whom no treaties or faith could bind, … would they not have the right to enslave them” until the danger had passed?25 Thomas Morris cites a 1712 South Carolina law that imagines coercion as a form of benevolence. Since the bondspeople “brought unto … this Province” were driven by “barbarous, wild, savage natures,” the lawmakers claimed, with an exquisite blindness to their role in the transport, the public has the right to “restrain the disorders, rapines and inhumanity” to promote its “safety and security.” After the Denmark Vesey conspiracy, South Carolina passed the first of many similar “Negro Seamen” acts targeting free black sailors who allegedly prompted the rebellion. “We have much more reason to believe in the moral contagion they introduce,” declared Charleston lawyer Benjamin Hunt, “than in the importation of yellow-fever.”26 Yet while Harper, for one, denied that masters “nightly repos[e] over a mine”—so benign and enlightened were their ministrations (47)—many of his peers were less sanguine. Vigilance, in the form of slave patrols and the often unrestrained aggression of masters and overseers, was a constant menace in Southern life, as the rulers attempted to coerce the ruled. Their intentions involved two variants of

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police power. Through an appeal to the patriarchal roots of absolutist governance, political activists celebrated the paternalist domesticity of their plantations. Alternatively, and more provocatively, ambitious managers and technicians viewed the enslaved as resources to be deployed just as efficiently and soullessly as beasts and tools. Although the two approaches were not exclusive—paternalists often imagined sympathy as a management technique—together they constituted a Southern plenum, an all-­ encompassing grid of objects, statutes, and affections purportedly enhancing their sovereignty. The inherent violence of the enterprise was barely, if ever, acknowledged. Revisiting Eugene Genovese’s resonant claim regarding paternalism in Roll, Jordan, Roll, Lacy Ford has recently argued that plantation benevolence was a genuine, if limited response not only to abolitionist criticism but also to the humanitarianism of the Second Great Awakening. Slaves must be recognized as human beings, so the claim went, governed by compassionate masters responsible to and for the well-being of their charges.27 “They become part of his family,” the Reverend Richard Furman declared concerning the master’s devotion to his bondspeople, “(the whole, forming under him a little community) and the care of ordering it, and providing for its welfare, devolves on him.”28 Here, the crucial term “welfare” seems to undo attributions of bestiality and savagery by recognizing the enslaved as subjects covered by salus populi, the people’s health. Yet despite Furman’s attempts to prove slavery scripturally sound, and the occasional master’s clemency or concern notwithstanding, we should recognize in these appeals a shrewd adaptation of the internal police, with its dialectic of utopianism and coercion. The two motives, as I have suggested, were inextricably linked, since the need to suppress nuisance and contagion—promote the people’s welfare—was but one means of prophylaxis for the wise manager. From this perspective, paternalism represented yet another borderland colonized by the internal police. The abstractions of paternalist domesticity, elevated above the sordid reality of daily life among the enslaved, found its ideological counterpoint in the annals of plantation management. Whereas paternalists almost never mentioned the disciplinary terror of their conduct, the technicians among them were frank about the relation of duty to profit. “The care and management of his slaves, forms an important branch of the planter’s business,” declared an essayist in The American Cotton Planter and Soil of the South. “Well treated and cared for, and moderately worked, their natural increase becomes a source of great profit to the owner.” A correspondent

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to Freeman Hunt’s Merchant’s Magazine, reprinted in the Cotton Planter, mixed metaphors by lauding a “well digested police” that “employed” bondspeople “in a climate and atmosphere adapted to their physical nature,” one that exchanged “moral … instruction” for “vicious—inclinations and actions.”29 Here one sees stark evidence of what Walter Johnson calls the “agro-capitalist” ecology converting bodies into profits.30 Others more frankly used the term to emphasize a comprehensive plantation oversight, as did W. W. Hazzard in 1831. The “internal police” governing his domain folded a concern for the health of bondspeople into a scheme for the administration of tasks—the planting of corn, the regulation of feed, the constitution of work gangs.31 Edward Laurens provided perhaps the most comprehensive statement of the matter.32 Like the two essayists just cited, Laurens is concerned to elaborate “our police regulations for persons of colour,” both enslaved and free (617). Invoking Thomas Aquinas in an excursus on clemency, Laurens stresses the paternalist’s “natural softness of … heart,” which mixes discipline with mercy (623). But Laurens is deeply concerned that paternalism alone will not answer the South’s chief threat: the noxious “influence” (621) of free blacks. “To abate this nuisance,” masters must practice severity, not softness, in pursuing “the entire extinction of the class” (621). Charleston had only narrowly escaped the Vesey plot and Nat Turner had struck in Virginia; how many more crises must it endure before its “insecure” property lost all “intrinsic value” (622)? It was not by accident that more than one local improvement association termed itself an “Agricultural and Police Society.”33 The overall effect of this discourse was to underscore the insular nature of Southern police power. In the secular regime change that America was undergoing—the shift from an internal police incited by both promise and insecurity and promoted by the states, to a national discourse in which utopian promise and power derived not from the suppression but from the promotion of insecurity—paternalists represented a retrograde or regressive moment. Their stance did not signify the smooth and comprehensive preamble to a nationalist police presence, as claimed by some legal theorists, but rather a position in a dialectical conflict—the “Not-A” that gave urgency to the need for national purgation. That premise preoccupied the benevolent empire, which provided the crucial link between local discipline and an expansive—indeed borderless—national claim. * * *

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While Northern evangelicals shared a passion for discipline, their distinctive version of police action proved to be national, not regional and parochial—a stance that prepared the ground for a genuine regime change after the war. Originating as a response to disestablishment and the waning of Federalist power, Northern reform movements of the early nineteenth century gradually altered from attempts to resurrect local ecclesiastical control to more comprehensive initiatives, modeled in part on the Foreign Missionary Society, that placed the work in a potentially unlimited field. The new purpose was less to secure a particular family, town, or congregation than to reclaim the national soul. “We want a system which shall be one,” declared advocates of domestic missions, “a system whose sentinel, stationed to survey our land in its whole extent, shall keep his eye alike on every part,” from “Georgia, to Louisiana, to Missouri, and to Maine.” National guardians approached this challenge not as a call to regulate individual bodies but to discipline the nation through means as “harmonious” as “the actions of a single man.”34 Lyman Beecher, in a sermon on intemperance, for example, projects the symptoms of alcoholism on the very order of the world: Oh! were the sky over our heads one great whispering gallery, bringing down about us all the lamentation and wo [sic] which intemperance creates, and the firm earth one sonorous medium of sound bringing up … the wailings of the damned, … as if the ghostly forms of departed victims flitted about [a] ship as she passed o’er the billows.

—only then could the dimensions of the problem be known. Here was a literal attempt to extend the plenum from a body of law to a performative vision of national conduct in which the personal shaped the political.35 For evangelicals, hegemony entailed a new emphasis on the people’s soul. Hence, the police focus on contagion and discipline took on additional urgency. When the challenge involves policing others, as Southern slavemasters recognized, the remedy meant shaping behavior where possible, and violently altering it where necessary. But when the threat was internalized, when the national sin was also personal, then the urgency and the violence of the problem intensified. “He is ‘worse than an infidel,’” William Lloyd Garrison declared, “who neglects his own household … I pity that man whose heart is not larger than a whole continent.” If “[t]he health of a nation is a matter of vast importance,” Lyman Beecher asserted, invoking the trope of the people’s welfare, then slavery or intemperance

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had the effect of “poison[ing] the atmosphere” and “depopulating the country around.”36 Immersed in that atmosphere, Northern evangelicals fought hard to suppress the nuisance, to eradicate the contamination. This was poignantly the case for women, who, as David Wright, Michael Young, and Lori Ginzberg demonstrate, increasingly dominated moral reform. Women who attacked licentiousness and recognized promiscuity and abuse as a distinctively male behavior must have known that no measure of moral suasion could alter the environment. Resolutions of female reform societies, which predominated in rural areas, called for the “purification of the heart,” the “purity of language and expression,” the destruction of “barriers … between the sexes.” They denounced the South as a sink of sexual corruption yet recognized through attacks on promiscuity in the North, that the contagion was universal. And despite the efforts of the conscientious to sever all ties with the slave power, the nation’s recurrent financial and political crises exposed the economies of corruption that had pervaded every aspect of social commerce.37 “Resolved,” decreed the Topfield, Massachusetts, Anti-Slavery Convention in 1834, “That the people of the Free States are involved in the guilt, the shame, and the danger of slavery,” and must devote themselves to “its utter and immediate extinction.” As with all projects of redemption, every assertion of freedom disclosed new regions of menace: Dewey’s threat of infinitation drove the evangelical effort. Intemperance, declared Theodore Weld in 1832, imposed a “universal insecurity of life and property which quivered all the land over.” To William Lloyd Garrison, slavery was all-pervasive—“a gangrene preying upon our vitals—an earthquake rumbling under our feet—a mine accumulating materials for a national catastrophe.” “We are all alike guilty,” he flatly declared.38 In the “empty space” between corruption and redemptive purity, Northern evangelicals had staked out a new form of police action, part disciplinary, part emancipatory, anticipating an altered political regime. The key to this political shift involved the merging of discipline and social action through the trope of influence. While, as I have suggested, the term had wide, often sinister application in the public sphere, its adoption by moral reform, and particularly by women, gave “influence” a new and powerful resonance. Whereas the noxious influences targeted by the internal police often involved, as Lemuel Shaw noted, the enforcement of borders or boundaries, the evangelicals’ association of the term with the powers of sympathy worked to elide or check the insecurity—in effect, establishing a borderless border. If, as the Allegheny County Moral Reform

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Meeting alleged in 1836, “the sin of licentiousness” exerts “a more destructive influence … than any other in the catalogue of human crime,” then it is up to women, the vanguard of the movement, to exert their “powerful and salutary influence … over all classes in the community.” As Sarah Ingraham, editor of The Advocate of Moral Reform, argued, the “true power” of women’s “influence” has been only haphazardly “known, and … appreciated.” Now was the time to demonstrate its “moral force”— one ultimately tied, as Lori Ginzberg demonstrates, to an embrace of political parties.39 The appeal to women’s influence—abundantly revealed in the epochal response to Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin— helped to shift the terms of hegemonic engagement. While Southern spokesmen often vilified the efforts of Stowe, the Grimké sisters, and other women as evidence of Northern hypocrisy, the almost biological appeal to women’s power tended to elevate their activities above politics, above the local or contingent issues they addressed.40 If women’s gifts were natural and necessary, evangelicals implied, then their own operations were normative—interventions without prejudice, an advocacy beyond borders or partisanship. This reading had at least two effects. In the short term, as I have suggested, the claim to natural influences tended to enhance the evangelical position as guardians of the national soul: their police measures were worshipful, not disciplinary. But as a crucial intervention in antebellum politics, the refurbished role of influence suggested a passage beyond party or sectional conflict to an elevated position as the nation’s guardian. The fact that such a position was characterized not by the search for security or order but by the cultivation of insecurity made it a model for a new role involving a national police in which disruption and disorder were the avenues to increased authority and power. The organizational prowess of the benevolent empire made its example doubly determinative. After the founding of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions in 1810, reform societies proliferated, meeting every May in New York to refine strategy. Tract societies in cities imposed disciplinary grids, subdividing wards into buildings, blocks, and city squares for the targeting of every resident. Agents fanned out to towns across the country to penetrate “each school district, … visit every family.” In their “interdenominational cooperation, … national scope, and … narrow specialization of associations,” Michael Young notes, these fine-­grained efforts were unprecedented. In effect they constituted a kind of police infrastructure, one that, as Gary Gerstle shows, the federal government exploited after Reconstruction to extend its own reach. It is not

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unreasonable, then, to think of these agents as the harbingers of a new regime and mentality, in which emergency became the means of union. In part, this infrastructure was an aspect of what Christopher Castiglia calls “interior states”—those psychological components of social discipline promoting democratic order. But such interior states, as we have seen, are more broadly associated with the internal police, and thus deeply involved in the “fabrication” of political life, as Mark Neocleous understands that term. Insecurity, in the emerging regime, was indispensable to order.41 * * * In the remainder of this political survey, details of which will be provided in the coming chapters, I would like to suggest how states of exception heightened the contradictions that made the transition from internal to national police both possible and inevitable. One might think of the three critical periods in antebellum political life—the early 1830s, the decade from 1837 to 1847, and the struggle over Kansas from 1857 to 1861—as challenges to the authority and pertinence of police power. Each crisis involved more than a failure of local or national governance—the events, that is, were more than opportunities for the enhancement of “strong state” powers. Indeed, in each instance national or Congressional authority was either inadequate or irrelevant. The need to contain or suppress political or racial others challenged local sovereignty while it exposed a gap or empty place in federal power. Those gaps, in turn, intensified the political contest for influence and hegemony, inducing new cycles of insecurity. At critical moments, neither the internal police nor the federal government was up to the task. As an example, consider the congeries of events in the first period, the early 1830s, that would have made national headlines had a truly national newspaper existed. In October 1829, Virginia, the South’s most populous state, called a constitutional convention to consider redistributing political representation and power from the wealthy Tidewater region to the burgeoning Piedmont west. Delegates and newspapers in favor of the change invoked John Locke’s dictum, incorporated in the Virginia Declaration of Rights, to “alter or abolish” government when it no longer served political needs. The delegates, that is, were called to settle questions of boundary and influence entangled with the issue of slaves: Should a wealthy but waning region of slaveholders enjoy greater power than a surging upcountry less conducive to slave labor? Weeks of discussion in the House and the

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press produced only modest changes, but the convention seemed prophetic when a year later, Nat Turner upended Tidewater Southampton County, and an emergency session considered emancipating or otherwise policing Virginia’s black folk. While this session, lasting barely a month, was equally inconsequential, despite passionate appeals by Thomas Jefferson Randolph and others for gradual emancipation, the convention was once again preoccupied with boundaries. Most discussion focused on expelling all free blacks, and there was serious consideration of a statewide effort to uproot them, whatever the cost. The institutional challenges of containing slave violence were thus transformed into a disciplinary violence directed at the supposed “nuisances” or noxious “influences” that provoked Turner. In the background was a melancholy assessment of Virginia’s prospects, with or without free blacks: crops were failing; fields were barren; the state’s influence in national affairs was diminishing. Sincere or not, these sentiments suggested at least a momentary crisis of sovereignty, and of the internal police that sustained it. The Turner revolt, which sent shock waves through the region, may well have rendered more urgent two additional challenges, each tied to questions of sovereignty, boundary, and infinitation. South Carolina took this moment to challenge federal power over an alleged imbalance of revenue and influence driven by boundary conditions involving the impost. John Calhoun’s protest concerning the vast powers accrued by Northern manufacturers protected by the tariff and Southerners twice punished by it involved a vague but expansive sense of international trade as a plenum, a delicate assemblage of forces, from which Southerners were deliberately barred. In a state where bondspeople, in the most prosperous counties, vastly outnumbered their masters, this grievance may have functioned, like Virginia’s free blacks, as a target for frustrated sovereignty. And although Andrew Jackson accepted a political compromise to diffuse the crisis, the fact that a state could issue such a challenge to the federal government underscored the central state’s relatively modest police powers. This limitation may be seen in the almost decade-long maneuvers it took to accomplish Indian removal from the Southeast, first promulgated in 1830, and punctuated by the reversals of the Marshall Court, which in 1831 pronounced the Cherokees a dependent people at the mercy of the federal government, and in 1832 saw them as a sovereign nation whose treaty rights must be respected. For most of the decade, Georgia, whose aggressive actions against both Native Americans and evangelical activists provoked the Supreme Court cases, was in relatively the same position, since

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it could neither establish internal boundaries with rival “nations” nor expel them on its own. The violent removal of the Cherokees in 1838 was both a testament to and indictment of federal police power, since the vastly underfunded effort managed to transport an entire people but was also effectively an act of genocide. The fact that the distribution of tribes in Indian Territory was imposed with such insensitivity to the relations and rivalries of individual bands forecast the haphazard administration of public lands that would haunt Congress through the 1840s and wreak havoc in Bleeding Kansas. Like the Nullification controversy, the lengthy depression following the Panic of 1837, the second state of exception, was a matter of shaky borders and boundaries. Here the states’ rampant borrowing to fund internal improvements was undermined by a retrenchment by the Bank of England, sending shock waves throughout the economy. Jackson’s antipathy to central banks probably added to the crisis, as did the distortions introduced by his Specie Circular, and his failed pet banks did not have the resources or risk managers to resist regional pressures. Even the nation’s vast public land holdings did not stem the tide or provide badly needed revenue. Most were snapped up by speculators who purchased on credit and were often forced to relinquish their holdings when the market turned against them. Worse yet, there was not enough money to survey and register even a fraction of the acreage so that land claims were soon mired in legal and extralegal conflicts that Congress only gradually resolved.42 The party that had at least a nominal vision of a national police power, Henry Clay’s Whigs, was able to exert partial legislative influence but could never impose national order. But that, in large measure, was the way the parties wanted it, since the matter of land distribution and the conversion of territories into states carried the constant menace of disrupting the politics of slavery. Increasingly, neither domain of the polity, the states or the federal government, was capable of exerting sovereignty. The annexation of Texas and the Mexican War only heightened the strains by effecting a vast new infusion of territory without the resources or the political will to absorb it. Kansas, of course, represented the nadir of this process and a kind of terminus to the problem of antebellum sovereignty. Here, all the forces that had stymied federal power and undermined local discipline exploded in sustained, often spectacular violence. Both free-state settlers and Missouri stakeholders exploited the many loopholes in territorial land policy and governance, electing two constitutional conventions, writing two state constitutions, and disrupting the legal process for years. Federal

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jurisdiction had become thoroughly politicized—or, more to the point, politics had become parochialized. A weak and recursive internal police had come to dominate national affairs. Most strong state theorists date the recovery from national catastrophe to the post-Reconstruction era. In a tradeoff engineered by the Hayes administration, the South was allowed to update its internal police practices in return for a nominal and effectual allegiance to the United States. It was from this period, as Gary Gerstle demonstrates, that the federal government began to maneuver within and beyond the strict bounds of the Constitution to extend its plenary powers. States of exception figured prominently in each new access of authority, often with conscious reference to the police. A Thomas Nast political cartoon after the devastating Panic of 1873, for example, depicts President Ulysses Grant in a policeman’s uniform vainly attempting to comfort Columbia amid the ruins of Wall Street (Fig. 3.1). A turning point occurred as a consequence of the Spanish American War. As Alfred McCoy argues, the imperial presence that the United States established in the Philippines moved decisively to enhance police power—not only by imposing new health and safety measures on the archipelago but also by creating new modes of surveillance, including the first American intelligence agency, to suppress Philippine resistance. These innovations quickly returned home in the guise of the American Protective League and the Military Intelligence Division, which targeted Germans, blacks, Catholics, Asian Americans, labor unions, and other “subversives,” eventuating in the Palmer raids of 1919–1920 on leftists and immigrants. American missionaries also mobilized, seeing the new empire as a chance to promote the millennium by stamping out alcohol, prostitution, and the opium trade threatening Americans from overseas. As Amy Kaplan argues, “the dream of imperial expansion” became “the nightmare of its own success.” Concurrently, Woodrow Wilson wielded vast emergency powers over industries and materials to prosecute World War I—measures he largely rescinded after the war’s end. With his numerous and sustained declarations of emergency, Franklin Roosevelt permanently shifted the balance of federal power, providing the basis for the security state that emerged with the Cold War.43 Walter Benjamin would have recognized the impetus for this aggressive police power in a declaration of national emergency by Harry Truman authorizing the Korean War:

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Fig. 3.1  Thomas Nast, Out of the Ruins. Harper’s Weekly, October 18, 1873. (Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, Washington, D.C.) I summon all citizens to make a united effort for the security and well-being of our beloved country and to place its needs foremost in thought and action that the full moral and material strength of the Nation may be readied for the dangers which threaten us… .

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I summon every person and every community to make, with a spirit of neighborliness, whatever sacrifices are necessary for the welfare of the Nation … I am confident that we will meet the dangers that confront us with courage and determination, strong in the faith that we can thereby “secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity.”44

What Claude Lefort called “the people as one” emerges from a dire necessity that demands a benevolent paternalist, deeply responsive to the crisis, to protect the nation from its enemies. The menace was far away in a place that most Americans would never see, but it remained as intimate and terrifying as the contagion of communist influence at home. On that protected yet tenuous ground, Americans would stake their claim to global police power.

Notes 1. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, trans. James Schleifer, ed. Eduardo Nolla, 2 vols. (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2012), 1:78. Subsequent citations will be given parenthetically in the text. 2. Here I follow the French original: “The state makes some general police regulations, but ordinarily it is the towns and town officers, conjointly with the justices of the peace, and according to the needs of localities, that regulate the details of social life and promulgate prescriptions relative to public health, good order, and the morality of its citizens.” See De la Démocratie en Amérique, deuxième edition (Paris: Pagnerre, 1848), 1:112–113), my trans. 3. Significant contributions to this vast field include Charles Sellers, The Market Revolution: Jacksonian America, 1815–1846 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991); Alfred Chandler, Jr., The Visible Hand: The Managerial Revolution in American Business (Cambridge: Belknap Press, 1977); Alasdair Roberts, America’s First Great Depression: Economic Crisis and Political Disorder after the Panic of 1837 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2012); Ann Douglas, The Feminization of American Culture (New York: Knopf, 1977); Sean Wilentz, Chants Democratic: New York City and the Rise of the American Working Class, 1788–1850 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984); Daniel Walker Howe, What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of American Culture, 1815–1848 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007); Robert Wiebe: The Opening of American Society: From the Adoption of the Constitution to the Eve of Disunion (New York: Knopf, 1984); Ira Berlin, Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of

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Slavery in North America (Cambridge: Belknap Press, 1998); Walter Johnson, River of Dark Dreams: Slavery and Empire in the Cotton Kingdom (Cambridge: Belknap Press, 2013); Tim Garrison: The Legal Ideology of Removal: The Southern Judiciary and the Sovereignty of Native American Nations (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2002); Paul Johnson, A Shopkeeper’s Millennium: Society and Revivals in Rochester, New  York, 1815–1837 (New York: Hill and Wang, 1978); and Robert Abzug: Cosmos Crumbling: American Reform and the Religious Imagination (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994). 4. Sean Wilentz, The Rise of American Democracy: Jefferson to Lincoln (New York: Norton, 2005), xxi, xxii. 5. John Brooke, “Cultures of Nationalism, Movements of Reform, and the Composite-Federal Polity: From Revolutionary Settlement to Antebellum Crisis,” Journal of the Early Republic 29 (2009): 2–3. For other versions of the “weak state” hypothesis, see Stephen Skowronek, Building a New American State: The Expansion of National Administrative Capacities, 1877–1920 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982); Richard Bensel, Yankee Leviathan: The Origins of Central State Authority in America, 1859–1877 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990); Lawrence Anderson, Federalism, Secession, and the American State: Divided, We Secede (New York: Routledge, 2013); Jeffrey Selinger, Embracing Dissent: Political Violence and Party Development in the United States (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016); Daniel Mulcare, “Restricted Authority: Slavery Politics, Internal Improvements, and the Limitation of National Administrative Capacity,” Political Research Quarterly 61 (2008): 671–85; and John Wallis and Barry Weingast, “Equilibrium Impotence: Why the States and not the American National Government Financed Economic Development in the Antebellum Era,” Working Paper 11397 (2005), National Bureau of Economic Research, http://www.nber.org/papers/w11397, accessed June 21, 2021. 6. Michael Mann, The Sources of Social Power, vol. 2, 2nd ed. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 59. 7. Brian Balogh, A Government Out of Sight: The Mystery of National Authority in Nineteenth-Century America (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009). For other applications of the strong state thesis, see William Novak, “The Myth of the ‘Weak’ American State,” American Historical Review 113 (2008): 752–772; Novak and Steven Pincus, “Revolutionary State Formation: The Origins of the Strong American State,” State Formations: Global Histories and Cultures of Statehood, ed. John Brooke, Julia Strauss, and Greg Anderson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 138–55; David Ericson, “The United States Military, State Development, and Slavery in the Early Republic,” Studies

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in American Political Development 31 (2017): 130–48; Richard John, Spreading the News: The American Postal System from Franklin to Morse (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995); Richard John, “Governmental Institutions as Agents of Change: Rethinking American Political Development in the Early Republic, 1787–1835,” Studies in American Political Development 11 (1997): 347–80; Jerry Mashaw, Creating the Administrative Constitution: The Lost One Hundred Years of American Administrative Law (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012); Stephen Rockwell, Indian Affairs and the Administrative State in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010); Aaron Hall, “Slaves of the State: Infrastructure and Governance through Slavery in the Antebellum South,” Journal of American History 106 (2019): 19–46; and Laura Jensen, Patriots, Settlers, and the Origins of American Social Policy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). 8. William Novak, The People’s Welfare: Law and Regulation in Nineteenth-­ Century America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996); and Markus Dubber, The Police Power: Patriarchy and the Foundations of American Government (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005). See also Novak, “The American Law of Overruling Necessity: The Exceptional Origins of State Police Power,” States of Exception in American History, ed. Gary Gerstle and Joel Isaac (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2020), 95–122; Novak, “Police Power and the Hidden Transformation of the American State,” Police Power and the Liberal State, ed. Markus Dubber and Mariana Valverde (Stanford: Stanford Law Books, 2008), 54–73; Christopher Tomlins, Law, Labor, and Ideology in the Early American Republic (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993); Tomlins, “Necessities of State: Police, Sovereignty, and the Constitution,” Journal of Policy History 20 (2008): 47–63; Tomlins, “Framing the Fragments. Police: Genealogies, Discourses, Locales, Principles,” The New Police Science: The Police Power in Domestic and International Governance, ed. Markus Dubber and Mariana Valverde (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006), 248–94; Tomlins, “To Improve the State and Condition of Man: The Power to Police and the History of American Governance,” Buffalo Law Review 53 (2005): 1215–72; Mark Neocleous, The Fabrication of Social Order: A Critical Theory of Police Power (New York: Pluto Press, 2000); Gary Gerstle, Liberty and Coercion: The Paradox of American Government from the Founding to the Present (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015); Gerstle, “A State Both Strong and Weak,” American Historical Review, 115 (2010): 779–85; and Anna Law, “Lunatics, Idiots, Paupers, and Negro Seamen—Immigration, Federalism

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and the Early American State,” Studies in American Political Development 28 (2014): 107–28. On the gradual arrogation of Federal power, see especially Gerstle, Liberty and Coercion, 89–311. 9. Nicolas Delamare, Traité de la Police (Amsterdam, 1729), 4, my trans.; Michel Foucault, “Omnes et Singulatim: Towards a Criticism of ‘Political Reason,’” The Tanner Lectures on Human Values, https://tannerlectures. utah.edu/_documents/a-­to-­z/f/foucault81.pdf, 248 (accessed June 15, 2021); Marc Raeff, “The Well-Ordered Police State and the Development of Modernity in Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Europe: An Attempt at a Comparative Approach,” American Historical Review 80 (1975): 1226–27. See also Foucault, The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality, ed. Graham Burchell, Colin Gordon, and Peter Miller (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 91–103. 10. Mark Neocleous, Critique of Security (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2008). 11. Novak, The People’s Welfare, 4. 12. Gerstle, Liberty and Coercion, 61–69; Novak, The People’s Welfare, 167. 13. Journal of the House of Delegates of the Commonwealth of Virginia (Richmond: Thomas White, 1828), June 19, 1784, p. 68; June 22, 1784, 72; May 29, 1784, 28; June 10, 1784, 49; provisions of legal code: October 31, 1785, 13. 14. Documentary History of the Ratification of the Constitution, ed. John Kaminski and Gaspare Saladino (Madison: Wisconsin Historical Society Press, 1976–), 14:23. Subsequent citations will be given parenthetically in the text. 15. Tomlins, “The Supreme Sovereignty of the State: A Genealogy of Police in American Constitutional Law, from the Founding Era to Lochner,” Police Power and the Liberal State, 39. 16. Arthur Jacobson, “Hegel’s Legal Plenum,” Cardozo Law Review 10 (1989): 881. 17. Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of the Concepts of Pollution and Taboo (Florence, Kentucky: Routledge, 1984), 95, 100. 18. Nancy Jay, Throughout Your Generations Forever: Sacrifice, Religion, and Paternity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 20. 19. Charles de Secondat, Baron de Montesquieu, The Spirit of the Laws, trans. Anne Cohler, Basia Miller, and Harold Stone (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), e.g., 9, 285; David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature (1739; Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1888), 61, 116. 20. Henry St. John, Viscount Bolingbroke, Remarks on the History of England (Basil: J. Tourneisen, 1794), 237.

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21. The Federalist, ed. Jacob Cooke (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 1961), 259. Subsequent citations from this edition, noting both essay and page number, will appear parenthetically in the text. 22. Colleen Sheehan, The Mind of James Madison: The Legacy of Classical Republicanism (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 139–40. 23. Commonwealth v. Cyrus Alger, 7 Cush. 53, 61 Mass. 53 (March 1851), 85, 96–97, http://masscases.com/cases/sjc/61/61mass53.html, accessed June 10, 2021. 24. Cited in Jeffrey Young, Domesticating Slavery: The Master Class in Georgia and South Carolina, 1670–1837 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999), 168. For a discussion of Charleston’s police response to Denmark Vesey, see Kathleen Sullivan, “Charleston, the Vesey Conspiracy, and the Development of the Police Power,” Race and American Political Development, ed. Joseph Lowndes, Julie Novkov, and Dorian Warren (New York: Routledge, 2008), 59–79. 25. William Harper, Memoir of Slavery (Charleston: Burges, 1838), 9. Subsequent citations will be given parenthetically in the text. 26. Thomas Morris, Southern Slavery and the Law, 1619–1860 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996), 268; Michael Schoeppner, “Peculiar Quarantines: The Seamen Acts and Regulatory Authority in the Antebellum South,” Law and History Review 31 (2013): 565. See also Schoeppner, Moral Contagion: Black Atlantic Sailors, Citizenship, and Diplomacy in Antebellum America (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019). 27. Eugene Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made (New York: Random House, 1974), 3–10, 76–86; Lacy Ford, Deliver Us From Evil: The Slavery Question in the Old South (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 143–72. 28. Richard Furman, Rev. Dr. Richard Furman’s Exposition of the Views of the Baptists Relative to the Coloured Population of the United States (Charleston: Miller, 1823), 10. 29. The American Cotton Planter and Soil of the South 1 (1857): 295; The American Cotton Planter 1 (1853): 354. 30. Walter Johnson, River of Dark Dreams, 221. 31. W. W. Hazzard, “On the General Management of a Plantation,” Southern Agriculturist 4 (1831): 352. 32. Edward Laurens, “An Address Delivered before the Agricultural Society of South Carolina, September 18th, 1832,” Southern Agriculturist 5(1832). Citations will be given parenthetically in the text. 33. Southern Agriculturalist 10 (1837): 393; 12 (1839): 230. 34. Michael Young, Bearing Witness Against Sin: The Evangelical Birth of the American Social Movement (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006),

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67. Paul Johnson argues that, whereas many Northern evangelical masters saw it as their duty to oversee and care for apprentices and other laborers in their own families, that impulse began to wane dramatically by the 1830s, as the market revolution took hold. See A Shopkeeper’s Millennium, 43–45. See also Philip Scranton’s “Varieties of Paternalism: Industrial Structures and the Social Relations of Production in American Textiles,” American Quarterly 36 (1984): 235–57, arguing that antebellum factory owners extended educational benefits to their operatives, eliminated “noxious moral influences,” and engaged in “policing” (237). 35. Lyman Beecher, Six Sermons on the Nature, Occasions, Signs, Evils, and Remedy of Intemperance, 10th ed. (New York: American Tract Society, 1833), 82–83. 36. William Lloyd Garrison, Selections from the Writings and Speeches of William Lloyd Garrison (Boston: Wallcut, 1852), 51–52; Beecher, Six Sermons, 72. 37. Daniel Wright, “The First of Causes to our Sex”: The Female Moral Reform Movement in the Antebellum Northeast, 1834–1848 (New York: Routledge, 2006), 131, 133. 38. Michael Young, Bearing Witness, 148; Theodore Weld temperance address, November 15, 1832, cited in Abzug Cosmos Crumbling, 96; Garrison, “The Dangers of the Nation,” Selections, 49, 60. See also Lori Ginzberg, Women and the Work of Benevolence: Morality, Politics, and Class in the Nineteenth-Century United States (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990); Carroll Smith Rosenberg, “Beauty, the Beast and the Militant Woman: A Case Study in Sex Roles and Social Stress in Jacksonian America,” American Quarterly 23 (1971): 562–84; and Amber Moulton, “Closing the ‘Floodgate of Impurity’: Moral Reform, Antislavery, and Interracial Marriage in Antebellum Massachusetts,” Journal of the Civil War Era 3 (2013): 2–34. 39. Young, Bearing Witness, 43; Wright, First of Causes, 235; Ginzberg, Women and the Work of Benevolence, 67–97. 40. John Brooke, “There is a North”: Fugitive Slaves, Political Crisis, and Cultural Transformation in the Coming of the Civil War (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2019), 159–202. 41. John Matsui, “Kindling Backfires: Cultivating a National Antislavery Movement, 1836–1838,” Slavery and Abolition 34 (2013): 472; Young, Bearing Witness, 76–77; Gerstle, Liberty and Coercion, 118–121. See also Christine Stansell, City of Women: Sex and Class in New York, 1789–1860 (New York: Knopf, 1986), 64–68; Ginzberg, Women and the Work of Benevolence, 40–41, 58–59; Daniel Walker Howe, “The Evangelical Movement and Political Culture in the North During the Second Party System,” Journal of American History 77 (1991): 1223; and Theda

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Skocpol, Marshall Ganz, and Ziad Munson, “A Nation of Organizers: The Institutional Origins of Civic Voluntarism in the United States,” American Political Science Review 94 (2000): 527–46. On interior states, fabrication, and insecurity see Christopher Castiglia, Interior States: Institutional Consciousness and the Inner Life of Democracy in the Antebellum United States (Durham: Duke University Press, 2008), and Mark Neocleous, The Fabrication of Social Order, 45–62. Neocleous, influenced by Marx, sees insecurity in relation to property, rather than to disposition or status. On the relation between benevolence, imperialism, and insecurity, see also Michelle Moran, Colonizing Leprosy: Imperialism and the Politics of Public Health in the United States (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007), 19–29, 47–57; Michael Barnett, Empire of Humanity: A History of Humanitarianism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2011), 54–56, 63–64; Paul Kramer, The Blood of Government: Race, Empire, the United States, and the Philippines (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006), 102–103, 117–119 (Kramer examines the post-war American campaign against Filipinos as a response to “American masculinist angst” [103]); Ian Tyrrell, Reforming the World: The Creation of America’s Moral Empire (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010); Alfred McCoy, Policing America’s Empire: the United States, the Philippines, and the Rise of the Surveillance State (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2009)—a particularly rich account of classic people’s welfare measures, colonial surveillance, and the effect of such practices on the United States itself; Amy Kaplan, The Anarchy of Empire in the Making of U.S.  Culture (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002) [citation on p.  12]; and Stephen Porter, Benevolent Empire: U.S.  Power, Humanitarianism, and the World’s Dispossessed (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017). For the antecedents of this evangelical imperial project, see Emily Conroy-Krutz, Christian Imperialism: Converting the World in the Early American Republic (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2015). 42. Paul Gates, History of Public Land Law Development (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1968), 178–180; Malcolm Rohrbough, The Land Office Business: The Settlement and Administration of American Public Lands, 1789–1837 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1968), 251–70, 301–302; Eric Hilt and Katharine Liang, “Andrew Jackson’s Bank War and the Panic of 1837,” https://economics.harvard.edu/files/ economics/files/panic_1837_harvard_final.pdf, accessed July 7, 2021; and Peter Rousseau, “Jacksonian Monetary Policy, Specie Flows, and the Panic of 1837,” Journal of Economic History 62 (2002): 457–88. 43. For a discussion of the American security state arising from the federal government’s police power to address insecurity through public welfare,

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see Neocleous, Critique of Security, esp. 76–92. On the Wilson administration’s role in national security, see McCoy, Policing America’s Empire, 293–318. The federal government’s duty, Roosevelt said, declaring a national emergency in his first inaugural address, is “to secure the insecure” (Neocleous, Critique, 85). 44. Emergency Powers Statutes: Provisions of Federal Law Now in Effect Delegating to the Executive Extraordinary Authority in Time of National Emergency, U.  S. Senate Report 93–549 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1973), 11. On Truman’s role in creating the national security state, see Michael Hogan, A Cross of Iron: Harry S.  Truman and the Origins of the National Security State, 1945–1954 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), esp. 1–22, 265–314. On the relation of the security state to police power (in the extended sense), see Stephen Porter, Benevolent Empire, 13–24.

CHAPTER 4

Poe’s Chess Game

Midway through his tenure as editor of the Southern Literary Messenger, Edgar Allan Poe exposed a hoax. “Maelzel’s Chess Player” undertook to debunk a sensational automaton, a chess-playing “Turk,” that in its near flawless performance seemed to defy logic.1 While Poe reveled in creating his own hoaxes, this apparent wonder cut too close to home. A carnival figure that could execute the most subtle feats of reason seemed to assail not only common sense but also creative sovereignty, undermining Poe’s almost priestly conception of art. And so it was that, after recounting Maelzel’s various magician’s maneuvers in opening and displaying the box on which the Turk and his chessboard rested—an interior apparently honeycombed with compartments and gears—Poe attacks the illusion with prosecutorial zeal, demonstrating how a slender operator could hide within, guide pieces, and execute moves. The wonderful contrivance was an outright fraud. Walter Benjamin may well have recalled Poe’s account when he devised his own metaphysical chess player in “On the Concept of History.” And though Benjamin used the figure to examine historical materialism, he undoubtedly sensed in Poe a kindred spirit. For Poe’s chess player, too, is a figure of history. In part, the device suggested the limits of sovereignty. As editor of the Messenger, Poe presided over a display of sovereignty in all its forms, from paeans to Southern culture to celebrations of civic order. Maelzel’s occulted operator subversively imparts a critique of that © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 J. Fichtelberg, Exceptional Violence and the Crisis of Classic American Literature, American Literature Readings in the 21st Century, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-07845-3_4

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enterprise by exposing the ghostly presence of the slave in the Southern machine: the automaton’s smooth functions are the consequence of a brutal imposition and suppression that, in effect, turn both Turk and operator into things. Yet Maelzel’s lucrative deception also evokes Poe’s contentious dependence on what Terence Whalen calls “the masses”—those furtive masters of Poe’s own fortunes often reducing him to an emaciated tool—as it summons the market revolution that gave those masses power.2 The contraption thus grounds Poe’s abiding concern, evident in texts from “Letter to B–” to Eureka, with the source and limits of creativity and its relation to material causes. Yet while Poe’s critique in “Maelzel” seems to invest thought, not a dusty curio, with sovereign power, his linking of the infinitely complex array of chess moves to the “infinity of different ways” (323) in which a carpenter could construct the operator’s cramped perch also suggests the multiplying threats to sovereign authority evident in any disciplinary regime. In Maelzel’s contrivance, Poe, like Benjamin, sees the furtive spirit of the police contending for a dubious order. The hidden hand of the chess player is also the figure of a debased yet capacious power. Not unlike the occulted chess player, Poe has often been confined to nether regions. Famously exiled from the American Renaissance by F. O. Matthiessen, he has lately been restored to the stage as an exemplar of the nation’s paradoxical investments and fantasies. He is the Whig aesthete rejecting Jacksonian politics for pure, untainted beauty; the harried literary artisan, servant of the market, seeking shelter in art for art’s sake; the racist and misogynist whose elaborate fictions cannot conceal his perverse allegiances.3 Such appraisals have, in effect, reversed the narrator’s intent in “Maelzel’s Chess Player,” turning the machine into an allegory for the political and cultural motivations of his work. As the Turk faithfully moves the pieces guided by an invisible hand, so Poe flawlessly renders the conventions and codes of his era. The effect is to rob him of agency: if not quite a slave—the most sinister resonance of the chess mechanism—Poe is both operator and mannequin, reproducing the influences of what Benjamin termed historical materialism. He is an artist imprisoned by his times. In this chapter, I would like to suggest an alternate reading of Poe and his work, one that accepts this criticism as part of a wider problematic. Like Benjamin, I will argue, Poe was keenly attuned to the contradictions of his era. A Virginian who worked predominantly in the North; an army veteran who resisted discipline; the often impoverished stepson of a

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wealthy, slaveowning stepfather who all but disowned him, Poe lived much of his life in borderlands, real or imagined, seeking an independence that often eluded him. At the height of his creative powers he declared bankruptcy; at the peak of his reputation he sabotaged his influence through drunken performances. Like Benjamin, he hustled for a living, producing an odd mélange of work, from studies on seashells to demonstrations of cryptography—anything to earn money and fill columns. Yet, like Benjamin, that very contingency and dependence made him a shrewd critical observer, one for whom the chess player is also an apt emblem. For the fraught relation between observer, operator, and Turk suggests the position of the cultural critic at once removed from, elevated above the operations he surveys, and deeply implicated in them. That vantage of abstraction, I have suggested in my reading of Benjamin, is also one of painful insight, as the critic recognizes the presiding power of cultural constellations. In this sense, Poe’s rendering of his era’s presumptions is not a symptom of blindness but a profound register of critical thought. Poe’s outlier status, often the matter of his outlier fiction, doubly shaped his life and work. A Southerner by affiliation, who once sold a slave for his aunt, Maria Clemm, and married a child wife, he was attuned to the effects of police and paternalism that increasingly beset the region as his career unfolded. Indeed, the states of exception surveyed in the previous chapter, from slave insurrections, to market shocks, to land hunger, had a demonstrable effect on his work. This relation is not the result of some abstract sensitivity or affiliation, but is rather the material consequence of his professional life. In reviewing and assembling hundreds of submissions for the journals he helped to edit, Poe developed an acute understanding of literary objects not unlike Benjamin’s scrutiny of cultural artifacts. Absorbing these materials, Poe constructed critical constellations through and against which his own work responded. All too often, Poe’s writing is approached as if it were idealist or ideological, divorced from the material world. Yet his magazine work, the source and substance of his livelihood, inevitably established a critical dialogue, or dialectic, far more telling than the literary criticism through which he asserted expressive principles. As I will try to demonstrate, the popular fiction he surveyed, much of it written in direct response to crises I have termed states of exception, grounded his own work in the anxieties and displacements of the era. Hence it is often possible to link Poe’s unsettling literary scenarios to his unsettled times. Those scenarios involve a clash between a presumed or desired constancy of action and the contingencies that violently upend them. In this

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sense, Poe is an acute register of the historical dialectic that Benjamin associated with Baroque kings and with Charles Baudelaire. Like tragic dramas, Poe’s work confronts states of exception, those eras in which sovereignty proves illusory and self-destructive. But in his acute sensitivity to the disruption of his times, Poe, like Baudelaire, is also a “traumatophile typ[e]” (SW 4:319), one through whom the shocks of an era become shocks on the page. The violence besetting Poe’s work, then, represents an attempt not only to respond to exception but also in some furtive way to master it by incorporating the inner history of disruption into the tenor of his prose. We can begin to understand that process by taking a closer look at the circumstances of Poe’s work, the states of exception that marked his volatile career. * * * My survey begins with a Southerner. John Calhoun inaugurated antebellum exception by his direct challenge to federal sovereignty. In his “Exposition and Protest” (1828), perhaps for the first time in America’s young political history, Calhoun weaponized the state of exception.4 To be sure, Northerners and Southerners had made numerous similar, mostly empty threats over disunion in the past, but no one—not the Virginia and Kentucky legislatures in 1798 and 1799 or the Federalists at the Hartford Convention in 1814—had put teeth into the warning by calling for a breakaway convention in peacetime.5 Calhoun did. In the “Exposition” he argued that a state convention should be empowered “to determine, authoritatively, whether the acts of which we complain be unconstitutional,” warranting “the interposition of the State to protect its rights” (351). The “system” of government favoring tariffs and manufacturing had created a majoritarian tyranny and insecurity that had spread the “disease” of party through unoffending states (338). “We are the serfs … out of whose labor” our oppressors are empowered, Calhoun declared (320). To preserve its integrity, a state convention would have to cleanse the polity by declaring federal law “null and void” (351)—an inviolable assertion of power. “The right of judging, in such cases, is an essential attribute of sovereignty,” Calhoun argued, replacing judicial review with the state’s police power, a function that “cannot be divested without losing … sovereignty itself” (348). Andrew Jackson responded in kind. Declaring a national “emergency,”6 he argued that Calhoun’s appeal to the internal police was a “horror” (186) whose very appearance might fatally wound

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the nation. “To say that any State may at pleasure secede from the Union,” he wrote in his Proclamation of December 10, 1832, “is to say that the United States are not a nation.” South Carolina’s implicit threat to defend its sovereignty by “force of arms” was nothing short of “treason.”7 Privately Jackson raged that the nullifiers were “in a state of perfect … insanity,” and denounced their “wicked” promotion of “civil war and bloodshed.”8 While Jackson awaited some provocative act by the nullifiers that would allow him to suppress the challenge by force, Henry Clay was able to orchestrate a tariff reduction that allowed Calhoun to claim partial victory. Clay had accomplished through political maneuvering what South Carolina could not have achieved through force of arms. Both sides had exploited a fluid state of exception to assert a narrative of sovereign power, yet the republic was arguably weaker for their efforts. Violence, or the threat of violence, had become an explicit political tool. Nowhere in the nation were the contradictions of sovereignty more acutely confronted than in Poe’s native Virginia, where, in 1829, delegates convened to rewrite the state’s constitution. Friction between the slaveowning Tidewater region and the more rugged west, clamoring for canals and railroads, had marked Virginia politics for a generation, but it was only during this era of sectional strains that the problem seemed too urgent to be denied. Westerners demanded that seats in the legislature be reapportioned according to a state census of white men; Easterners advocated a property qualification reflecting their numerous slaves. Echoing Calhoun’s stance in the “Exposition and Protest,” spokesmen insisted on the performative nature of sovereignty, claiming that the Lockean mandate to alter or abolish government amounted to the privilege of citizens to “confer [sovereignty] upon themselves.”9 “[T]here are no original principles of government,” argued Abel Upshur, a spokesman for Tidewater interests. “Principles do not precede, but spring out of Government” (69). Why empower “[m]asses of men,” asked Norfolk delegate Robert Taylor. “A single grain of gunpowder may explode in a lady’s boudoir without producing any effect sufficient to wave one of her lightest plumes; but when aggregated masses of those grains are exploded, castles topple to their foundations” (50). The debate gave ammunition not only to Westerners challenging Virginia’s elite, but also to those attacking its basis in slavery. The equation of property and power, angrily declared upcountry representative Philip Doddridge, “makes me a slave” (88). “I will accept no Constitution,” retorted slaveholder John Randolph, “that has the monstrous, the tyrannous, the preposterous, and abominable principle, that

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numbers alone are to be regarded as a fit basis of Representation” (501). Poe’s own monstrous representations would be shaped by such challenges to sovereignty. The convention finally settled on a reapportionment based on the 1820 census, retaining power in the East, but modestly extending the franchise.10 In the spirit of national politics, the center apparently held. But that consensus would be seriously tested within a year. In the aftermath of the Turner rebellion sectional strains flared anew in a debate over slavery. Although few delegates advocated outright abolition, the death toll in Southampton County had stirred fears over the future of Virginia’s most volatile property. After the House of Delegates was deluged with petitions demanding a permanent solution to the problem, Thomas Jefferson Randolph forced the matter to the floor, where spokesmen voiced a wide range of responses, from support for abolition or postnati emancipation, to deportation and redoubled vigilance. Haunting the debate, which closed with a vague commitment to revisit the issue when “public opinion” should be more “definite” (Freehling 148), was Calhoun’s assertion, now voiced by Doddridge, that all Virginians were slaves. “[S]lavery in Virginia is an evil,” declared William Brodnax, an advocate of colonization, “a mildew which has blighted in its course every region it has touched.” It was an “incubus” that encouraged idleness, depleted crops, and wasted resources—in short, a contagion ravaging all sovereignty.11 In this cradle of American liberty, some saw the Turner rebellion as a terrifying expression of natural rights, one that, in its “convulsive throes” promised that “history will be written in characters of blood” (January 31, 1832). Yet avoiding catastrophe was equally chilling. To eradicate the blight, some delegates spoke ominously of police powers—“the gradual diminution, or ultimate extermination of the black population of Virginia” (January 24 1832), and, indeed, the General Assembly passed a “Police Bill” sharply curtailing the rights of free blacks and criminalizing attempts by whites to educate them. “Will it be deemed an idea too bold,” declared Brodnax, “that I do not circumscribe these effects to the Commonwealth of Virginia; but view them as … extending over the world?” The millions alive and “the millions yet unborn” are implicated in the crisis shaking not only the “glob[e]” but “heaven” itself (January 24, 1832). In effect, the “monstrous” uprising (April 17, 1832) had darkened and amplified the antecedent state of exception, exposing the violent origins of all political power. “[D]oes it not become us, as men, and as patriots,” urged George Summers, “to look this monster fearlessly in the face?” (February 16,

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1832). Yet in that confrontation, many feared, Virginians might all too readily recognize themselves. The violent ambiguities surrounding the ownership of humans extended to claims on land. Property was the republic’s great equalizer, but also its great disrupter. During Jackson’s administration, the sale of government lands paid off the national debt, but the speculation in land and its improvement also helped to produce wild gyrations in financial markets, including the collapse of state bonds, the boom and bust of cotton production, and the recession that lingered into the 1840s. Especially during the first half of Poe’s career, many of these tensions involved the land of southeastern Indians, whose legal battles over sovereignty echoed sectional conflicts, evoked a sustained evangelical protest, and, once again, produced a divided response. As Mary Young demonstrates, the challenge to Native sovereignty often stemmed from lax or nonexistent checks on land deals, transactions brought about through a dizzying mix of official, casual, and furtive arrangements between tribal officials, individual families, land agents, and speculators.12 When gold was discovered in Georgia in 1828, the pressures on tribal land became unmanageable. The Cherokees undertook a sustained legal battle to protect a way of life that was often indistinguishable from that of white Georgians. Like the whites, the Cherokees had a written constitution, a judiciary and police force, a tribal newspaper written in Cherokee and English, and a network of family farms. Some of them owned slaves. When it decided to take legal action, the tribe hired the best talent available, former Attorney General William Wirt, who argued both Cherokee Nation v. Georgia (1831; a loss) and Worcester v. Georgia (1832; a pyrrhic win). Yet the cases, like the status of the tribe itself, were rooted less in legal precedent than in the state of exception. In both cases, Marshall wrestled with the power of the internal police to discipline outsiders with claims on the Union. Like the Nullification contest, with which it was politically entangled, the Cherokee suits challenged Americans to revisit the question of sovereignty. Seldom in Supreme Court history has there been an instance of near contemporaneous decisions with such opposite intent. Both cases hinged on Georgia’s attempts to annex Cherokee lands by declaring that nation’s sovereignty invalid and its treaties with the federal government void. Invoking its right to regulate its own affairs, Georgia undertook to survey tribal holdings, dispose of Cherokee “improvements,” claim its mineral rights, and oversee white settlement. The Cherokees, the 1831 suit claimed, saw but two alternatives: “either to surrender their lands in

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exchange for others in the western wilds of this continent, which would be to seal, at once, the doom of their civilization … or to surrender their national sovereignty, their property, rights and liberties … to the rapacity and injustice of the State of Georgia.”13 Yet after a careful review of colonial and national precedent, Marshall rejected these arguments. In populating the New World, he maintained, Europeans had asserted sovereignty through the right of discovery. “It is in vain now,” Marshall wrote, “to inquire into the sufficiency of the principle … that the right of sovereignty, as well as soil, was … asserted and exercised by the European discoverers.” “From that source,” Marshall concluded, “we derive our rights.”14 Neither does the Court have the power, granted in Article 3, Section 2 of the Constitution, to settle disputes between domestic states and those of “foreign” nations. Such language did not apply to “a hunter horde” or “to a people within our limits and at our very doors” (28). Although the Cherokees were anomalous, they were not sovereign; rather, they were a “domestic dependent natio[n]” (Reports 2), subject to state and federal law and incapable of pressing their claim. The territory was not theirs to own. Political fallout from Georgia’s aggressive stance prompted the second suit. In 1831 the state arrested two missionaries, Elizur Butler and Samuel Worcester, for violating laws against advocates living among Indians, and the prisoners appealed. The case drew national attention. Evangelicals deluged Congress with petitions likening the detention to biblical martyrdom. Marshall, who, as Tim Garrison argues,15 was genuinely disturbed by the implications of the earlier ruling, this time extensively reviewed the major treaties the Cherokees had signed, concluding that “The Indian nations have always been considered as distinct, independent political communities” that retained their “natural rights” unless compelled by “irresistible power.”16 “A weak state,” he added, “in order to provide for its safety, may place itself under the protection of one more powerful, without stripping itself of the right of government, and ceasing to be a state” (520). Since the federal government deemed the Cherokees a sovereign nation, Georgia’s laws “can have no force,” and the missionaries’ imprisonment was a “nullity” (520); hence Georgia, not the missionaries, had violated sovereignty. Despite the decision, Jackson refused to intervene, maintaining that he had no Constitutional warrant to impose on state affairs, but the issue drew sharp scrutiny in Congress, where spokesmen perceived a near existential crisis. How is it possible, asked Edmund Pendleton of New  York, that “in a Government of law, … the law is

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without authority”? Refuse to free the missionaries and order will yield to “collisions … decided not by law, but by war.”17 But the missionaries, insisted Thomas Foster of Georgia, were themselves the source of disorder, sowers of “anarchy, confusion, and bloodshed” (3410). The clash of political and legal doctrine, Foster argued, had created a state of exception that must be resolved through force, lest sovereignty itself disintegrate. Force, it turned out, was the political remedy, as the civilized tribes were expelled from the region by the end of the decade. These issues can be seen most acutely in the contest over the annexation of Texas and the ensuing war with Mexico. In Congress, spokesmen wrangled for weeks over the nature of “Texian” sovereignty and its candidacy for statehood. Texas presented a Constitutional anomaly. It was neither unorganized territory nor a cession by an existing state, but an independent republic seeking an entry into the Union for which there was no precedent. Opponents of annexation like Indiana Whig Samuel Sample argued that neither Congress nor the people of Texas could effect the change. Annexation would actually destabilize the Union, since any law “might be repealed: and what stability would there be for the territories … while public opinion was so liable to change”?18 Nor could the sovereign people of Texas confer union, since they had no Constitutional claims on the nation. The Republic of Texas itself, Sample maintained, was a state of exception, a paradoxical zone where to “extend the area of freedom” was to “wide[n] the boundary of slavery” (121). Supporters of annexation like Alabaman William Yancey insisted on Texan sovereignty by invoking its struggle with Mexico. Like our own revolutionary conflict, the Texas rebellion “call[ed] into requisition the nobler qualities of our nature” (100). By throwing off a repressive regime, Texans conclusively demonstrated their republican convictions, and their immense efforts bespoke a “lofty patriotism” (100). Texas, then, “was sovereign, and free to make an alliance with us” (101). In the heroism of Texas, legitimate states would recognize their own noble ideals. Beyond the sectional wrangle over slavery, however, which Yancey dismissed as “the contemptible machinations of the mere politician” (100), Texas evoked the political risks of the empty place. The violent fantasies unleashed by annexation spoke to the problem of infinitation that defined American sovereignty. “[T]he march of free institutions was onward,” argued Ohio Democrat Ezra Dean, extending not only to Texas and Oregon, but also to “Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, the Canadas, and even Mexico; and all the other possessions on this continent, even to the polar

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regions” (Globe 123). It was inevitable, then, that opponents foresaw catastrophe in a political process they likened to contagion. “This proposition was too gross and monstrous,” declared New Yorker Daniel Barnard. “If we might admit independent Texas into the Union, … we might in the same way admit independent St. Domingo or independent Turkey” (188). Massachusetts Whig Robert Winthrop fulminated that the admission of Mexicans and thousands more slaves into the Union “was a thing so monstrous as almost to exceed belief” (94). Calhoun raised similar, if opposite, objections about the Mexican War. Incorporate Mexico, he warned, and we would have to absorb “an Indian race,” and thus “destro[y] the social arrangement” governing American society. “Ours,” he insisted, “is the Government of a white race.”19 Excess, whether of land, law, or language, threatened sovereignty, a prospect that appeared to both Barnard and Calhoun, as it did to the Virginian William Brodnax, like an aberration of nature itself. To insist on sovereignty was to harbor the monstrous other.20 One of the clearest examples of this process may be observed during the sustained economic downturn that Alasdair Roberts calls America’s First Great Depression. As Roberts demonstrates, this six-year event was not merely an economic disturbance but a political and cultural one as well.21 The collapse began when states defaulted on their public works bonds, prompting a massive tightening of credit by English institutions faced with their own shortfalls occasioned by the rising cost of wheat and other staples. Concurrently, a glut of cotton sharply reduced prices, leading to the failure of Southern bankers and merchants that soon spread north and east. The wide suffering sparked waves of urban and rural violence, from anti-rent actions in upstate New  York to labor riots in New York, Boston, and Philadelphia. “Here now, is another emergency,” lamented South Carolina Senator William Preston in 1837 as President Van Buren sought authorization for repeated Treasury emissions. “I believe that the treasury habitually exists in a state of emergency—in a critical condition” (Roberts 104). For defenders of the standing order, the crisis evoked a sustained hymn to a liberal republic in which the anonymous operations of capital and commodities had replaced the guardians of public welfare. Trade, declared the Reverend G.  W. Burnap in 1841, touches the tradesman “with her magic wand, and transforms him into a new creature. She cleanses him from his filth and negligence, … clothes him in seemly and decent apparel,” and provides “life and health” for the commonwealth, without which the social body faces certain “paralysis and death.”22 Yet victims of the marketplace, many of them suffering through

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the same appalling want that Poe experienced in the 1840s, had a very different reading. An article on “The Banks and the Currency” in an 1838 edition of The United States Magazine and Democratic Review, denouncing the “monstrous crudities of the day,” imagines the excesses of credit as an enemy invasion.23 Like cancerous versions of Jackson’s nemesis, Nicholas Biddle’s Second Bank of the United States, antebellum banks asserted unprecedented “sovereignty” by determining “the value of all … property and labor,” overwhelming consumers with “hazards and temptations” defying all regulation (10). “Banks, more banks,” are the nation’s greatest harvest, springing up with the invasive “ease and quickness” of prairie grass in “every street and lane,” there to wreak a violence that shatters both “heart and soul” (7). Yet the banks seemed to operate in an empty place, immune to both local and federal law. Driven by the anonymous forces of excess and speculation—the same forces corrupting land, labor, and politics—antebellum banks and bankers were less agents than symptoms of eroding authority. The violence of the antebellum economy was thus a measure of political insecurity in an era governed, it seemed, by an invisible, malevolent hand. Like the agent in Maelzel’s chess player, that mysterious influence would provide the materials and motives for Poe’s traumatic art. * * * At the core of Poe’s best work is a version of what Benjamin called the dialectical image, the nucleus of a cultural isotope charged with explosive antithetical value. As I have tried to suggest, such images and effects coincided with states of exception, the most vivid symptoms of an incipient regime change shaping antebellum politics. Poe’s dialectical practices take several interconnected forms. Throughout his career he adopted an adversarial, often satiric engagement with the materials at the journals he edited—the Southern Literary Messenger (1835–1837), Burton’s Gentleman’s Magazine and Graham’s Magazine (1839–1840, 1841–1842), and the Broadway Journal (1845). These occasions for dissent, subtle as they were pervasive, provided a kind of ideological critique, a measure of his distance from the police norms of purity and safety the magazines purveyed. Poe’s critical fictions were sharpened by his own traumatic history of illness, alcoholism, impulsivity, and poverty, imperatives that made the collective shocks of the era all the more poignant. In the besetting public crises of his career—including the Turner rebellion of

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1831, the prolonged recession of 1837–1843, and the war fever provoked by the annexation of Texas—he must have recognized the symptoms of a near universal distress, as if the menaces were magnifications of his own trauma. Penury produced a third definitive shock in the humiliating bankruptcy of 1842 that ruthlessly assessed Poe’s work—his “few printed sheets,” as the document put it—being “of no value to anyone.”24 That assault on his sovereignty sharpened Poe’s visceral and divided response to the slave system, which seemed both a refuge from and an intensification of the market pressures that hounded him. As an embodiment of entrepreneurial free labor, Poe represented a threat to a Southern order increasingly suspicious of Northern designs. Protecting that order entailed violence, whether through the internal police or territorial expansion, a response that Poe assailed through a succession of frenzied but fearful narrators who both desired and loathed possession, property, and their own sexuality. These dialectical stresses, which tracked the states of exception marking Poe’s career, were most pronounced during his final years, when he had at last attained a measure of sovereignty as editor and owner of the Broadway Journal. The failure of the Journal and his strained, contradictory alliance with Young America evoked, through the sketches and tales he reprinted, a final barbed critique of the public discourse he had helped to shape. Poe emerged as a sharp—and sharply engaged—critic of his times. Like his political target and nemesis Andrew Jackson, who liked to joke that his enemies expected “to see me with a Tomahawk in one hand, & a scalping knife in the other,”25 Poe acquired the reputation of a tomahawk man. In a review written shortly after the publication of “Maelzel’s Chess Player,” a New York critic testily noted the editor’s “quite too savage a way of pouncing” upon his literary victims, who rarely escaped being “scalped” or “mangled.” A decade later, when Poe edited the Broadway Journal, Nathaniel P. Willis confessed his eagerness to witness, during a lecture on “Poets and Poetry of America,” the “decapitation” of offenders with “the Damascene slicing of [Poe’s] critical blade.”26 But Poe’s fierce criticism, like Jackson’s military prowess, was less a matter of fixed temperament than of strategic deployment, evoked to advance a certain utopian ideal of order. Poe’s disciplinary idealism is best assessed in periods when he exercised at least some measure of control. His editorial work roughly coincided with the crises of sovereignty noted above. The period at the Messenger witnessed attempts, especially by Virginia writers after the Turner controversy, to come to terms with rebellion, out-migration, and withering fields. His tenure at Graham’s, at the height of the recession,

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was haunted by layoffs and poverty, and the year at the Broadway Journal was animated by the annexation of Texas and the ensuing conflict with Mexico. These circumstances were not merely the accidental contexts for the literary productions Poe oversaw. Rather, they were moments in a secular reconstruction of democratic power and authority played out in a series of disciplinary crises to which the writers responded. In many instances ephemeral pieces sought to reassemble the plenum, to reconstitute the shifting terms of order by using the local materials at hand. Poe construed his work in dialectical contest with these productions, recognizing, through his exploration of savagery, decay, violation, and liminal experience, the states of exception from which those productions emerged. Approaching Poe’s work from this perspective may illuminate the violence he directed at his adversaries and characters, and the deeply provisional nature of his art. When Poe began working for the Southern Literary Messenger in 1835, he was thrust into a milieu primed to respond to the problems of sovereignty emerging in that decade. Thomas White’s ambitious journal transformed the unruly contests of the empty place into a constellation of fixed forms, where they could be arrayed, examined, and composed. In doing so, he acted as a kind of corporate guardian, a regional arm of the internal police attempting, through his curated essays and belles lettres, to imagine a rejuvenated Southern plenum even as Southern integrity was under siege. For White, the Messenger was an urbane declaration of mastery. In starting the journal, he claimed that he did not intend to affront the “aristarchy” of Boston and New York; rather, he strove to bring about “the emancipation of the south” from its addiction to indolence and luxury.27 Like the internal police, White sought to deter threats by banishing them, running pieces that examined foreign despotism and corruption, but reserving a more modest and manageable decay for American offenders. Even at this early stage of his career, Poe set out to expose the implicit violence of White’s stance, and, through his slashing critical reviews, to mock the normative menace of Southern propriety. White’s writers confronted a double dose of peril. The constitutional debates in Virginia at the beginning of the decade had opened old wounds involving property and power. If the Piedmont region had fewer slaves and more white inhabitants, shouldn’t republican tenets assure them greater sovereignty? Tidewater oligarchs responded by insisting on their rights of property, and on the civic burdens that property imposed. Even as the easterners prevailed, however, their property seemed increasingly

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compromised. A recurrent trope appearing in Southern commentary throughout the antebellum period bewails what Walter Johnson calls the “carceral landscape”—the transformation of the natural environment into a disciplinary field.28 By leveling plots, securing sight lines, and coercing labor, plantation owners attempted to turn their holdings into ruthlessly profitable machines. Yet their discipline came at a cost, since the drive for efficiency inevitably threatened the paternalist order by sacrificing the ecological balance necessary for prosperity. Here was a material threat to the plenum that law alone could not contain. On this point, both Piedmont and Tidewater spokesmen agreed: the pursuit of profit was destroying the landscape. Virginia is “retrograding from her rank,” declared westerner William Naylor; “[h]er population in the eastern section is stationary, her fields are deserted, and improvements abandoned.” Northern Virginian Charles Mercer was similarly haunted by the “stunted forests,” ruined churches, and desolate lanes visited only by “the wolf and wild deer.”29 “[I]t seems as if some judgment of heaven had seared” the landscape, lamented Philip Bolling during the emancipation debate; nothing greets the eye but an “interminable wilderness.”30 Yet these local laments betray a more pervasive condition that Joseph Roach calls the “performance of waste”—the compulsion, in any disciplinary regime, to engage in the “catastrophic expenditure” of “material objects, blood, environments” to achieve “a sense of coherence in the face of … threat.”31 In White’s Virginia the threat was the relentless market and its embodiment the slave—the source of both coherence and catastrophe. Slaveowners, too, could be enslaved. White’s literary constellation in the Messenger offered several fixed stars to reanimate sovereignty. The brightest was George Washington, who, in his disastrous defeat under General Edward Braddock at the Battle of Monongahela, claimed one paean, first manifested a “vet’ran’s skill” through “wondrous deeds.” Even then, it was clear, Washington was a “man born to command” (1:556). Southern legal luminaries had a similar sheen. John Marshall’s character, like his writing, was “simple and masculine” (2:186), claimed one eulogy, “as strong as the fortress of Gibraltar” (188). William Wirt—“though a native of Maryland, … in truth a Virginian” (1:17)—likewise displayed a “commanding figure … that struck an instant sense of respect into all that looked upon him” (18). Such exemplars defined an ideal type set forth for White’s readers in an essay on “Servility.” The Southern “Urbanus,” claims the writer, is “courteous and polite to all, but in a state of subjection to none.” Character and

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attainments command his courtesy, but nothing can force “base submission to another’s will” (1:6). White understood the perils of sovereign assertion in Jacksonian America. In an Irvingesque sketch of a New England Independence Day celebration, a bemused narrator captures the insurgent order of American democrats, who marched and countermarched “just as it suited their own whim; in other words, will.” “They felt,” the Southern observer adds, “that they were the sovereign people and only citizen soldiers” (1:159). Poe clearly recognized these tensions, and mimicked White’s desire for an unfettered Urbanus who could exercise Southern command. Ironically, the best setting he could find for that claim was in the North, and in the distant past. In a review of Anne Grant’s Memoirs of an American Lady, Poe cites the narrator’s effusive praise for slave culture in Revolutionary-era Albany, where “the relation between master and servant [was] better understood … than in any other place” (2:511). Constant and intimate contact had led to the kind of “generous” and “tender” ties that would come to mark plantation novels, for the master was “baptised with the same baptism, nurtured under the same roof, and often rocked in the same cradle” as the slave (512). While Poe may not have opposed the slave system, he had a keen ear for dissimulation and cant, and it is clear that this sentimental sketch of domestic servitude is as strained as Lieutenant Washington’s claim to “wond’rous” heroism. Authentic sovereignty, in Poe’s work, is never so unambiguously serene. More pronounced are dramatic lapses in sovereignty, virtually all occurring overseas. In “A Scene in Paris—1827,” a “Virginian” relates the trials of Charles X, who had to tread carefully when an authoritarian measure went awry. After announcing sharp curbs on free speech, the king met with violent opposition. Crowds menaced the homes of his ministers and threatened the entire city until Charles took the decisive step of dissolving the National Guard, the last vestige of the Revolution, signaling his ruthless resolve. The relieved Virginian points the moral: nothing but the “unexpected boldness” of the measure could have overawed the rebels (1:384). That formula seemed to fail, however, in a long-running series on Tripoli recounting the treacheries of the Muslim world. Eighteenth-­ century Africans behaved like Renaissance Italians, engaging in Machiavellian coups and counter-coups with murderous abandon. On one notable occasion, the reigning potentate invited 300 of his rivals to an entertainment; all were dispatched by morning. A pasha’s death left his three sons so desperate for power that even their mother could not restrain them. At a meeting designed to mollify two of the claimants, one ruthless

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rival produced a Koran and two pistols, killing his counterpart and inciting a bloodbath. “Every species of cruelty” ensued, in scenes too “shocking to relate” (1:132). Foreign savagery made Southern excesses seem benign. Such scenes framed White’s implicit defense of slavery. If the institution was familial and nurturing, then domestic threats like the Turner rebellion must have the same eccentric origin. White ran several pieces during Poe’s tenure by or about Thomas R.  Dew, slavery’s apologist-in-chief, who wrote a lengthy critique of the Virginia emancipation debate. “The slave is happy and contented with his lot,” Dew declared, and any objections were the work of “agrarian[s]” who, like the rioters of Manchester and Smithfield, plotted “midnight murders” and used their demonic “wrath” to put “the torch to the political edifice” (2:278). “A Virginian” added his own defense in a tour of Northern agrarians. In “Letters from New England,” he reported a genteel canard tagging Boston abolitionists. In Massachusetts there was “a certain quantity of moral virus, or noxious gas,” he was told, menacing people and property (1:87). White’s writers, guardians of the people’s welfare, provided the necessary antidote to the disease. But even the most rigorous quarantine could not entirely expunge the evidence of Southern decline. Here White’s writers mounted a provisional, if porous defense of their carceral milieu. If it was all too true, as “Nugator” wrote, that “wild beasts … had multiplied” in Virginia’s “barren wild” (1:82), then it was up to the Southern Literary Messenger to revive the state by recalling its “charms” (83). Virginia’s ruin was an aberration, a matter of altered inheritance laws or hidebound parents who failed to preserve their estates. Erstwhile “castles” on grand plantations were “hastening to decay” (1:9), yet the cause, these writers argued, was bad laws, not bad men. Only cleanse the Southern plenum by restraining democratic excess, and all may yet be well. Poe, too, conveys Southern vulnerability. In a nightmarish extract from Joseph Holt Ingraham’s The South-West, he summons a New Orleans dock fire in which ignited cotton sparks a holocaust: As tier after tier, bursting with fire, fell in upon the burning decks, the sweltering flames, for a moment smothered, preceded by a volcanic discharge of ashes, which fell in showers upon the gaping spectators, would break from their confinement, and darting upward with multitudinous large wads of cotton, shoot them away through the air, filling the sky for a moment with a host of flaming balls. (2:123)

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Ingraham’s apocalypse seems more than a hazard of commerce; it has the effect of the Last Judgment. Yet the flames originated, Poe seems to suggest, not in Virginia but in the “South-West,” against which White’s pages provided a fragile cordon. The parlor world of his genteel readers might yet hold off this menace of trade. Doubtless, part of Poe’s appeal to White lay in his ability to mount that defense. Even if, as several scholars have argued, Poe was not the author of the odious Paulding-Drayton review, he had written with apparent approval of Albany slavery and had deployed Southern taste against a range of excesses. Ever skeptical of popular influence, Poe attacked Lydia Huntley Sigourney for pandering to “the critical and bibliographical rabble” (2:112). Like contentious democrats or a raging fire, indifferent readers threatened White’s literary barricade; as Poe put it, “any multiplication of zeros” cannot “eventuate in the production of a unit” (112). Poe also attacked Southern excess. In a review of William Gilmore Simms’s The Partisan, he called out the author’s fascination with torture, objecting to a scene in which a character “receives a flogging.” Simms tries “to interest us in the screeches of the wretch,” Poe complained, in “the number of the lashes—in the depth, and length, and color of the wounds” (1:121). Such scenes, exposing the underside of plantation idylls, had to be rigorously disowned. Yet Poe had already developed a reputation for wielding his own literary lash. Midway through his tenure, White commented on his slashing critic with a mixture of tolerance and relief. In the most recent reviews, White claimed, “[t]he sledge-hammer and scimetar [sic] are laid aside” (2:342), allowing Poe’s softer side to emerge. The battle could not be won by outrage alone. Poe’s kinship with violence, however, was not so tractable as his boss implied. The most disturbing advocacy of racist terror under Poe’s stewardship is not the Paulding-Drayton review but an apparent brief for lynch law. Once again Poe reaches into the past, claiming Virginia’s origination of the measure in Colonel William Lynch’s emergency action of 1780. Faced with war-time depredations by a “trained band of villains, whose operations extended from North to South,” and who defied “the ordinary laws of the land,” Lynch unleashed local force licensed “to put a stop to the iniquitous practices of those … abandoned wretches” (2:389). The response, anticipating similar calls after the Turner rebellion, suggests in disturbing detail the continuing need for the internal police. Devised during a state of exception, Poe’s appraisal suggests, lynch law’s terror should remain an instrument of power. Yet, as with “Maelzel’s Chess Player,”

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Poe’s advocacy comes with a twist—a thousand-word barrage of legal discourse and corporate oaths almost bathetic in their precision: We solemnly protest before God and the world, that (for the future) upon hearing or having sufficient reason to believe, that any villainy or species of villainy having been committed within our neighborhood, we will forthwith embody ourselves, and … inflict such corporeal punishment on him or them, as to us shall seem adequate to the crime committed or the damage sustained; that we will protect and defend each and every one of us, the subscribers, as well jointly as severally, from insults and assaults offered by any other person in their behalf… (389)

The dolorous, endless sentence, “embodying” the bombast Poe so loathed, is not only testament but satire, an exposure of excessive force through a discourse as excessive as the imagined conspirators. Poe may not have objected to race discipline, but in his objection to undisciplined thought he called into question the very premises behind White’s own literary barricade. Lynch’s law, like Sigourney’s poetry, was a concatenation of zeros, an empty place resisting unity, conveying both severity and inanity. Poe’s scimitar could cut two ways. * * * In his fiction during this period—much of it published in the Messenger— Poe treated the threats to order exposed by the challenges of slave revolt and Indian removal as the opening gambit in a sustained critique of Southern sovereignty. Subjecting White’s anxieties to the withering exaggeration and satire he deployed in the reviews, Poe moved decisively to a more radical appraisal of representation that attempted to account for the violent disruptions of the market—including the commercial influence of slavery itself. Although Poe, as the comments on Albany paternalism and lynch law suggest, was no opponent of slavery, his fiction exhibits a rigorous interrogation of the assumptions that made slavery possible—perhaps the most searching appraisal of any antebellum writer. Yet Poe’s aim was to renovate, not to derogate, and as his career unfolded, he sought the means to restore the fragile vision of a customary order that was disappearing before his eyes. Although Poe’s fiction is often read as a denial of or retreat from the contemporary, the early work seems clearly rooted in the states of

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exception attending Jackson’s presidency. The political satire “Four Beasts in One,” set in ancient Antioch, is shadowed by the Turner rebellion, in the “mutiny” incited by “the wild animals domesticated in the city” (2:237). A more pointed evocation appears in “Hans Phaall—A Tale,” in which the protagonist escapes Rotterdam by igniting a conflagration as fearsome as Ingraham’s—a “horrible and tumultuous … hurricane of fire, and smoke, and sulphur, and legs and arms, and gravel, and burning wood, and blazing metal” (1:569). Phaall’s escape in a balloon covered with newspapers suggests the immediate urgency of the response, an urgency reinforced in the numerous references to decay and disease that mark companion stories. Antioch, the narrator of “Four Beasts” informs us, is—or “will be” in a lamentable state of decay, so “ruinous” that the patriarch himself must flee (2:236). In this city dependent on slaves, “[w]e cannot help perceiving abundance of filth in every kennel” (236). In “King Pest the First,” London is wasted by disease: “The paving-stones, loosened from their beds, lay in wild disorder amid the tall, rank grass.” “[F]allen houses choked up the streets. The most fetid and poisonous smells every where prevailed” (1:758). Here, Virginia’s wasted fields become the symptoms of a general corruption impervious to discipline. One may only wonder how Thomas White read this grotesque portrait of sovereign order. Poe’s critique of that order in the early tales took two forms. Haunted, like his Virginia contemporaries, by the Turner rebellion, he summoned the shadow world of slavery sustaining, like a menacing medium, the everyday violence of masters. But, in a more searching move, Poe also attempted to account for that medium by exposing and burlesquing its principles of representation. Those principles, he recognized, were as contradictory as slavery itself. The attempt to see humans as things, to reduce the spiritual to the material, provoked a corpus of dialectical imagery that drove Poe’s most provocative work. Poe’s first two horror stories to appear in the Messenger, “Berenice” and “Morella,” announce these themes. The latter tale describes a clairvoyant wife, predecessor to the revenant Ligeia, who is preoccupied with the “Principium Individuationis,” that “intelligent essence” conferring identity (1:449). When she dies, unloved, in childbirth, that mystery is transferred to her daughter, whom the narrator attempts to shelter, like so many of Poe’s characters, through rigorous quarantine. But just as London’s hovels cannot keep out the plague, so a church cannot protect his daughter, whose delayed baptism turns into a body snatching. There,

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on the “black slabs of her ancestral vault,” as his spirit grows “dark,” the rejected mother emphatically asserts her possession (450). The depraved narrator of “Berenice,” who buries alive his sickly wife after ripping out her teeth, intensifies this savage consumption by reversing it. Now the desire to inhabit and dominate another is a kind of atmosphere, a distorted visionary field that entrances the narrator, submerging him in objects as if reified. “All other matters and all different interests became absorbed in their single contemplation,” confesses the narrator. “They … became the essence of my mental life” (1:335). Such tales magnify the fears of subversion and miscegenation inherent to slavery. They suggest that the infection against which the narrators defend is a condition of sovereignty itself. No story in Poe’s early canon conveys that condition with greater force than the savage farce “Loss of Breath.” Almost every detail of the story reveals Poe’s desire to attack and burlesque, through sheer hyperbole, the sanctimonious posturings of Southern apologists appearing in the Messenger. Poe’s Mr. Lackobreath is an abuser facing abuse—stopped in the act of “seizing” his newlywed “by the throat” (1:735) when he is attacked by a spasm of breathlessness that nearly deprives him of voice. Thereafter he is ritually scarified. He is thrown out of a cab so that his skull is fractured and his arms broken by a wheel, as if on the rack. Given over for dead, he is vivisected, hanged, has his ears cropped, and is entombed alive, where he discovers in a neighboring vault the thief who stole his voice and, rejuvenated, makes his escape. Here, as in “Berenice” and “Morella,” sovereignty is supremely vulnerable, but Poe’s target is less the subversions of slavery than the very language of its apologists. Hence, Lackobreath immediately attempts to camouflage his debility by memorizing John Augustus Stone’s Metamora, a popular but stilted rendering of King Philip’s War depicting racial cleansing. Deprived of his native voice and principal authority, Lackobreath becomes the object of a brutality he had initially visited upon others, like the vanishing Indian forced to enact the violent racial fantasies of his audience. For Lackobreath, language is a kind of void, an empty place, like a vacuum into which rush all the murderous impulses of the speaker, or of Poe’s readers. Violence itself becomes a sustaining medium. These themes are given their definitive and most farcical rendering in “Hans Phaall.” The protagonist, who flees a milieu awash in “liberty, … long speeches, and radicalism” (1:567), seeks a truly empty place—a solitary transit through space. In a balloon plastered with newspapers, he survives by means of a condenser and alights at last amid that “extremely rare

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etherial medium” (571) of the moon. Here, the terrain is a haunting version of a Southern plenum, marked by phantom forests and fields, and a lake that “grows blacker with age” from which, in an allegory of enslavement, “shadows were continually coming out, and taking the place of their brothers, thus entombed” (575). The inhabitants of this magic kingdom, each of whom has a mysterious but vital connection to a counterpart on Earth, lack ears and language, precisely like Lackobreath, yet they are also involved in those “dark and hideous mysteries which lie in the outer regions” of the satellite (580). Language, life, the public sphere itself are reduced to so many empty menaces, not unlike the compensatory fictions over which Thomas White presided. Poe may well have seen or heard one of those menaces, uttered by John J. Roane during the Virginia emancipation debate and published in the Richmond Enquirer. “I think slavery as much a correlative of liberty as cold is of heat,” Roane declared. “[T]he torch of liberty has ever burnt brighter when surrounded by the dark and filthy, yet nutritious atmosphere of slavery.”32 That ruinous atmosphere— and the ruinous words that sustained it—are the object of Poe’s most bitter early commentary. * * * Just as the Southern Literary Messenger presented an elaborate brief for the persistence of plantation culture in the face of market pressures, so the contents of Graham’s Magazine, during Poe’s tenure as editor, attempted to cure the carceral excesses of market collapse, offering, in a kind of prophetic exegesis, a formula for the renewal of a chaste republic. If so many men had been deprived of livelihoods, their substance and estates destroyed, the compensatory fictions Graham’s offered attempted repeatedly to imagine a rejuvenated order in which the losses shaped a plea for penance and reform. This essentially Christian message, like the paternalist visions offered by the Messenger, reasserted purity and the people’s welfare. But, like Southern paternalists whose sentimental attachment to slaves was suborned by passion and the profit motive, Graham’s writers subtly but inevitably legitimized the very forces they sought to contain. They did so by admitting the sensuous and bodily impulses that shaped possession and sovereignty. Poe both absorbed and distended those impulses, transforming them into a staple of his criticism and his art. The longest economic downturn in the young nation’s history provided a ready market for earnest assessments. Drawing on the well-worn

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pieties of republican virtue, many writers for Graham’s stressed the mysterious power of moral economy. In J. Ross Browne’s “The Confessions of a Miser” (18:83–87, 102–104) an Italian gambler, so obsessed by wealth that he is willing to sell his own daughter, is arrested, freed, and hunted down by his enemies. Emma Embury’s “The Mistaken Choice” (19:13–17) traces the disastrous fortunes of a married couple who borrowed heavily, lived extravagantly, and ended divorced and destitute. A backwoodsman in J.  Topham Evans’s “The Silver Digger” (18:68–77) sells his soul for a bride price, to become a condemned outcast with but a trunkful of iron and leather for his pains. Such devastation underscores the need for that serene safety and discipline that only a moral community can provide. Accordingly, in “Clara Fletcher,” an heiress fends off the designs of an artful rake by denouncing his “calculating” attitude (18:41), and is echoed by the bluebloods of Saratoga when his bankruptcy is exposed. Agnes Piersol’s “The Wife” depicts a faithful consort who saves her ruined husband. “[A] fatality seemed to have seized him,” the narrator remarks. “He was in a whirlpool from which he could not extricate himself” without the aid of moderation, faith, and prayer (20:193). Such narratives, asserting a moral plenum amidst the emptiness of avarice, attempt to replace passion and chance with meaning and authority. In effect, the tales act as plenary overseers, restoring the balance essential to the people’s welfare. But just as emergencies were gradually transforming the internal police into guarantors of unrestrained competition, so the trials of these fictive sufferers often proved contingent and equivocal. In “Leaves from a Lawyer’s Portfolio: The Robbery and Murder” (18:224–34), James Stanhope’s family, devastated by the universal panic, is forced to live in a snow-filled hovel. When Stanhope is arrested and convicted for the murder of his wealthy father-in-law, who had rejected the marriage and disowned his daughter, only the surprise appearance of an exonerating witness prevents his execution. Another tale set in medieval France tells of a beautiful Muslim stranger condemned to the stake by the irate judge of a provincial town and rescued at the last moment by her furious husband, just returned from the Crusades. The “howling” populace, with its “uncontrollable” rage (19:7), seems a venomous perversion of the internal police. Such trials are condemned from the start—as senseless and irrational as the threats against which they defend. When the police themselves cannot be trusted, the people’s welfare disintegrates. The most subtle and pervasive challenge to moral order involves the erotics of possession, the confusion, in virtually all of these tales, between

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licit and illicit desire driven by the passion for purity. It is this confusion, implicitly evident in Southern appeals to paternalism, that mediates and incites the market transformation that Poe both embodies and assails. From Poe’s vantage, the stories are allegories of desire. An initial insistence on the perfection of the love object incites severe trials, often figured through the imagery of combat or violent storms. Yet while the narrative presents a rite of purification in which the male protagonist must prove himself worthy of love, it also represents a shattering sexual climax. The action in these tales is thus a kind of seduction, a sensuous commerce with the world that irradiates all objects with the luminous appeal of the loved one. Far from disciplining consumption through moral economy, these tales license consumption with an overwhelming erotic power. So pervasive is the pattern that a few examples will suffice to demonstrate both their appeal and their importance to Poe. In H. Dana’s “The Thunder Storm,” the male narrator, childhood friend of the surpassingly beautiful Agatha, feels a “delirium of indescribable emotions” (18:285) when she intimates a mature and genuine love. But it is not until a storm as fearsome as the “day of doom” (286) overtakes them that their bond is confirmed in an “ecstacy” incited by their frightened embrace (287). A more elaborate example appears in “The Maiden’s Adventure: A Tale of the Early Settlers of Virginia.” Kate Lee, “the loveliest girl in the country” (18:109), is to be married to the equally celebrated and hardy Richard Gaston, the entire community gathering in the humble log cabin of Kate’s father. The bride, however, is a hybrid, a frontier woman equally adept in the kitchen and the field, and her jet-black hair suggests that she has more than a passing affinity with her Indian neighbors. That kinship proves vital in the ensuing conflict. The unexplained murder of a local brave incites an attack on the wedding party, accompanied by a ferocious storm so powerful that it shatters the rude chimney. With each successive wave of attack, assailants’ bodies pile up in the doorway until, overwhelmed, Kate is forced to flee in a canoe, to be joined, after several more desperate encounters, by her wounded husband, whom she wed during a lull in combat. Both the storm and the piled bodies, like semen crowding the threshold, suggest the intensity of the violent, eroticized passage that has also legitimated their claim to the land, a claim sealed by Kate’s unrivaled perfection. To possess this near-Native wife is to inseminate the region in an incendiary climax. R. S. Nichols’s “The Stolen Miniature” (18:265–68) captures this dynamic in a context that moves us quite close to Poe. A college-bred n’er-do-well, Bradley Spencer, falls in with a gang of house

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breakers working in New Orleans after being ruined at the gaming table. During his final break-in he comes across a lovely sleeper, steals her captivating miniature, and bears it like a talisman to New  York, where he is inspired to prove himself worthy of the original. Unaccountably, his beloved is equally fixated on the thief, whose bedroom invasion has impelled her to delay marriage until the miniature is restored. The erotic object thus permits a sexual commerce in which ruin and dishonor are spiritualized and made the basis of a purified love. Such commerce, displaying what Benjamin called the “traumatophil[ic]” aspect of commodity fetishism, is captured in a largely neglected sketch Poe published contemporaneously in Graham’s Magazine. The ingredients of “Life in Death” (later titled “The Oval Portrait”) are, at first glance, little more than a feeble allegory. The narrator, wounded by “banditti,” takes refuge in an unoccupied chateau, where he worries over how much opium to swallow to assuage his pain (20:200). After he has found some relief, he examines the contents of the ornate room where he has been deposited, the walls of which are covered by dim portraits. As the hallucinatory effects of the drug intensify, he is fixated by one portrait of “a maiden of rarest beauty” whose “perfect life-likeliness of expression … confounded, subdued and appalled me” (201). A musty catalogue of the room’s paintings provides the grim narrative—of an artist who, reversing Pygmalion’s powers, was so passionately and imperiously absorbed by his wife’s beauty that he drew all her life into the painting, killing the model herself. The vivid but deathly object affects the narrator “with the shock of a galvanic battery” (201), yet that doubly traumatic representation conveys the impossible purity of the artist’s vision. The haunting, all-­ consuming object, so deeply invested with desire, both empties the subject and irradiates the room with a restored, yet violent perfection. This aesthetic invasion, akin to the assault on Berenice, became the abiding problem of Poe’s mature fiction and criticism. * * * It was during the prolonged recession, when his family subsisted on bread and molasses, that Poe began to think through the material relations of his art. As in his work at the Messenger, he did so by both distorting the claims of more conventional writers and exposing them to a radical critique that laid bare, like the evacuated subject of “Life in Death,” the savagery of their representation. His most arresting tales of the period resituate the

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effects of the panic. “The Conversation of Eiros and Charmion,” appearing in Burton’s Gentleman’s Magazine shortly after Poe was hired, evokes an apocalyptic scenario in which the Earth is annihilated by degrees. An approaching comet with superabundant oxygen first stimulates a “wild luxuriance of foliage,” then consumes the planet in a fireball. The creeping catastrophe, like the holocaust in Lars von Trier’s Melancholia (2011), sends “the intensest terror through the universal heart of man.”33 “A Descent into the Maelstrom” presents a similar crisis. The “whirlpool” that engulfed Edward Walpole in Piersol’s “The Wife” is now an annihilating vortex, shaking the very mountains, shattering vessels, “speeding dizzily round and round … and sending forth … an appalling voice” as if proclaiming “its agony to Heaven” (Graham’s 18:236). Poe also summons the licentiousness assailed in Graham’s stories. In 1842, he planned, but never executed, a reprint of the story “The Visionary,” which had appeared in the Southern Literary Messenger in July 1835, and in Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque (1840). In the retitled “The Assignation,” an elderly husband of a beautiful young wife cruelly tosses her child into a Venetian canal when he discovers it is not his. The intrepid father plunges into the “abyss” to save the child, but takes his life the next morning in a suicide pact with his lover.34 In these instances, Poe has darkened the satiric excesses of his earlier tales, creating an existential dread not unlike the terror felt by the living dead in “Eiros and Charmion.” The moral tales reverberate in a shattering new key. Poe keenly discerned the subversive erotic tenor of those tales that converted moral discipline into market seduction. In his hands, the apocalyptic tale of “Eiros” was an allegory for the impossibility of reclaiming order in a world driven by the desire for property and power. Indeed Eros hovers over his most poignant tales of the period, usually with disastrous results. The “superhuman beauty” of the Marchesa Aphrodite in “The Assignation” is marked by a “stain of melancholy” (640), a moral flaw that is as fatal to her lover and child as are the vicious designs of her husband. The unhinged narrator of “Ligeia,” like the artist of “Life in Death,” is equally ravenous in his melancholy appraisal of beauty: I examined the contour of the lofty and pale forehead—it was faultless … the skin rivalling the purest ivory…; and then the raven-black, the glossy, the luxuriant and naturally-curling tresses … I looked at the delicate outlines of the nose—and nowhere but in the graceful medallions of the Hebrews had I beheld a similar perfection. … I regarded the sweet mouth … the teeth glancing back, with a brilliancy almost startling, every ray of the holy light.35

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The narrator’s invasively worshipful gaze effectively neutralizes Ligeia’s uncanny power by literally objectifying it—representing her attributes as things. Poe echoes and burlesques this strategy in “The Man That Was Used Up.” The reconstructed and incomparable General A. B. C. Smith is the sum of his unrivaled and artificial attributes. “Upon this topic,” says the narrator, “I have a kind of melancholy satisfaction in being minute. His head of hair … was of a jetty black … his unimaginable whiskers … encircled … a mouth literally unequalled. Here were the most entirely even, and the most brilliantly white of all conceivable teeth.”36 Yet this “singularly commanding” (66) figure, the nation’s cynosure, is but a faint vestige of the sovereign Washington, and his repulsive, shriveled, amputated, and unadorned figure mocks his adoration and fame. Indeed, Poe suggests, Smith is a kind of currency wherein the old world of safety and sentiment is transformed into a new species of empty and anonymous projection. Everyone adores the General, yet no one can fathom him. The love stories of Graham’s, too, Poe implies, were but a heap of fragments vainly gesturing to a soulless and reconstituted form. Just as bodily attributes are objectified in Poe’s erotic narratives, so objects are sensualized, given an uncanny and magnetic allure. Both “The Assignation” and “Ligeia” turn furniture into mental property. The Byronic hero of “The Assignation” keeps a private chamber filled with Renaissance art, including a captivating Madonna. His “habit of intense and continual thought” (639) transforms the objects into attributes of his lover, and her innumerable perfections into figures of worship. Similarly, the demonically ornate bedroom of Ligeia’s widower is covered with shifting arabesque figures that seem to alter with observation. The central censer, with its writhing, snakelike forms, the massive sarcophagi guarding the veiled bed, the gold curtains that seem to merge with the rich carpet make the entire scene an animated tomb in which object and fantasy are continuously reflected and exchanged. This commerce of grief and desire suggests not only the obsessive mourner but also the sensuous consumer, investing a passion in things that Benjamin likened to a “phantasmagoria” (Arcades Project 669 [X13a]). The narrator’s confused, worshipful accumulation makes him a close cousin of the slavemaster, whose most cherished possessions express the occulted labor of his slaves, the socially dead. The recession underscored for Poe the problem of representation emerging from the Messenger era and sharpened by the market revolution. Passionately committed to the kind of purity and perfection celebrated in the paternalistic South and monitored by the internal police, he sought a

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means of expression that could withstand the assaults of a market society steeped in material excess. At the midpoint of his career, Poe attempted to divide the problem, examining both the emptiness of the emerging regime and the disciplinary excess that gave it force. His responses were driven and complicated by the market’s destructive investment in slaves—the source and object of both ruthless violence and erotic desire. Poe’s fixation on the limits of material and spiritual experience in both his critical and imaginative work was an expression of the inescapable premise of American life, its confusion of bodies and things, and the origin of his most unsettling dialectical imagery. We can begin to appraise that dialectic by considering Poe’s great diptych on emptiness and excess, “The Man of the Crowd” and “The Fall of the House of Usher.” The stories, to use a compelling image from the latter tale, are mirror images—“The Man of the Crowd” an allegory of public erasure, “Usher” a romance of secret presence. Yet both tales are linked, as through subterranean corridors, by an erotic intensity that attempts to make their fragments cohere. Walter Benjamin read “The Man of the Crowd” as Poe’s anticipation of Baudelaire: the account of a flâneur so immersed in the anonymous life of a great city that he becomes a kind of sensuous indicator—his incessant wanderings registering the city’s expressive life. As a mere observer, the narrator marks that life as a series of disorderly patterns—the “mob” distinguished, in riotous symmetry, by its dress, habits, and actions, the comings and goings of bankers and clerks, of loungers and laborers.37 Poe’s uncharacteristically enormous, almost Whitmanesque paragraphs, crammed with every gesture and detail of the passing crowd, are meant to evoke this detached experience. Yet it is only when the narrator singles out an old man that he becomes “singularly aroused, startled, fascinated” (269). Feeling a “craving desire” (269) not to let the stranger out of his sight, he pursues him with the determination of an infatuated lover. But the pursuit exposes little more than the menacing and loathsome reaches of the metropolis—“wooden tenements … tottering to their fall … [,] paving-stones [lying] at random … [,] [h]orrible filth … in the damned-up gutters” (270). This carceral milieu, reminiscent of “King Pest,” undermines the twin poles of market mentality by turning its unconstrained pursuit of wealth into aimless wandering, and its acquisitiveness into disease. As in “King Pest,” the narrator’s tour exposes corruption, yet more desperately, since the element of satire has fallen away and there seems no path to salvation. No wonder that the narrator declares the old man “the type and the genius of deep crime” (270). The empty

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public order takes shape for him only as the violation of some elusive and vanished ideal. Poe’s gothic ménage in “The Fall of the House of Usher” intensifies and redirects these themes by reimagining, as Harry Levin recognized, the Southern plantation narrative.38 The ruinous house, with its ancient, mismatched, and heterogeneous elements transfers the empty place of London to a private domain, and the deep reflecting tarn evokes the abysses characteristic of Poe’s panic fiction. Usher’s acute sensibility and freaks of fancy turn the mansion into a kind of animated and sensuous meeting ground, a locus of exchange fusing bodies and objects in a shimmering and disturbing plenum. Like the writhing silver curtains in “The Assignation” or the restless drapes and ponderous sarcophagi in “Ligeia,” the Ushers’ prison-house exerts an immense “influence” on the minds and hearts of its tenants, so that the very “physique of the gray walls” penetrated “the morale of … existence.”39 Those relations are underscored by Usher’s terrifying yet empty paintings. The “nakedness” of the artist’s designs reveals a barely suppressed, engulfing desire, an “intensity of intolerable awe” evident nowhere more powerfully than in the “glowing yet too concrete” dreamscape of Henry Fuseli’s The Nightmare (148) evoked by Usher’s productions. Hence, Usher’s most disturbing creation is also his emptiest—a “ghastly and inappropriate” rendering of an irradiated, vaginal tunnel (148). It is hard to imagine a more bitter rendering of the decay of sovereignty, as if Poe were indicting the promiscuity at the heart of both cotton culture and market collapse. In “The Fall of the House of Usher” the era’s moral tales of ruin and recovery received their most decisive rebuke. The inbreeding of the family, with its frisson of the siblings’ incestuous bond, only intensifies a corruption beyond redemption or appeal. That Poe understood the links between this corruption and slavery is beyond question. Beyond the gothic effects of darkness, the close coincidence between the era’s popular tales of sovereignty and Poe’s distorted analogues suggests that his critique was material as well as symbolic. Characters are almost uniformly dark-featured and black-haired. The protagonist of “The Assignation,” like General Smith and Ligeia, has dark hair and luminous dark eyes. Ligeia’s husband sleeps in an immense darkened bedroom on an ebony bed surrounded by black sarcophagi. The narrator of “A Descent into the Maelstrom” peers uneasily from the precipice of a “black shining rock” (235) to the “inky” sea below (235), where the dark, sleek bands of the whirlpool seem as murderous as the “black and lurid tarn” (146) that consumes the House of Usher. Although recent

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commentary has suggested that such references are a kind of ideological penumbra, the register of Poe’s bad conscience concerning race, the effect is actually more subtle, for almost all of these references occur at uneasy intersections or in limit cases: the mournful bed chamber of a revenant, the false face of a scalped soldier, the abyss beneath a palace, a mansion, or a mountainous shore. These ruinous limina, so closely linked to the derangement of material values associated with the panic, are moments of equivalence among blackness, distortion, and violence that threaten representation itself. In “King Pest” Poe suggests a haunting metaphor for this process. The doorway of the low dive in which the story’s roustabout sailors begin their momentous night displays the portentous warning, “‘No Chalk’ [i.e., credit] … scored … by means of that very identical mineral whose presence they purported to deny” (SLM 1:757). To the illiterate shipmates, the groundless warning is doubly alarming, a threat of punishment for the revelry they could not afford and an anticipation of their more hazardous foray into the dead zone of King Pest himself, where all distinctions disappear. But for Poe, the incomprehensible sign at a threshold suggests the challenge of a representation steeped in material attributes that are as inchoate as an alcoholic haze. In Poe’s fictions, blackness, like chalk, is simultaneously a medium, a limit, and an unstable intersection of the mental and the material. Blackness represented both the vortex of panic, in which property suddenly became valueless, and the menace of slavery, in which property could wreak violence. Like a whirlpool, a scalped skull, or an open sarcophagus, blackness signified an empty space to which no distinct value could be ascribed. Blackness was the allegorical loss of sovereignty and the violent disruption of meaning. “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” serves as Poe’s definitive response to the state of exception unleashed by the panic. The tale recoups all the tropes he found in the Graham’s stories, yet transforms them into something infinitely more dangerous—a menace eluding both the formidable police power of C. Auguste Dupin and of his tame but savage criminal. Like the Graham’s bankrupts, Dupin is a casualty of what contemporaries called “revulsion,” a loss of estate conceived as a kind of grotesque disease that reduced him to a man of the crowd.40 Like that individual, Dupin attracts the narrator with an inexplicable intensity: “I felt my soul enkindled within me by the wild fervor” Dupin displays.41 They, too, decamp to an empty mansion, there to enjoy the “treasure beyond price” (167) of solitary intimacy. At night they extend their erotic bond by sauntering out

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arm-in-arm into the streets, to absorb “that infinity of mental excitement” (168) that the city evokes. A keen analyst, Dupin positions himself at the limit of the material and the spiritual: his deduction of the narrator’s thoughts on the ham actor Chantilly rests on encounters with apples, newspapers, paving stones, and the odor of urine. When that keenness is transferred to the “Extraordinary Murders,” Poe treats the crime scene as an emptiness in which signification is both exigent and suspended. Money lies on the floor before an open safe, yet the victims are invisible—one shoved into a chimney, an intimation of both rape and birth, the other hurled into an alley, where the impact has rendered the corpse almost featureless. But the greatest mystery involves the brief ejaculations attending the encounter—the victims’ shrieks, the master’s cries, and the orangutan’s screams, which sounded like every language and no language. Poe thus exploits the tropes appearing in Graham’s—the lonely mansion, the hidden crime, the random savagery, the fatal abyss, the invaded bedroom, and the hidden nemesis. In a milieu filled with tales of broken men, Dupin surmounts these menaces, effortlessly asserting sovereignty. Readers have often noted the analogies between Poe’s rampant killer and the Turner rebellion, still resonant a decade later.42 But Dupin’s policing is arguably more disturbing than the actual crime. While he exposes the killer, avoiding, as he does so, the violence that led the gendarmes to destroy the house in search of clues, his very restraint exerts a terror all its own. Unlike the Man of the Crowd, whose wandering makes him criminal, the Murderer in the Rue Morgue, like his owner, is without fault. The law sees the sailor’s former property precisely as it sees slaves bound to their paternalist masters, as representative of an institution proclaiming sentimental order even as that order is assaulted. Indeed, in his most perverse twist, Poe links the cerebral detective with the beastly killer. Just as the orangutan penetrated the flat without a trace by means of a lightning rod, a shutter, and a spring-locking window, so Dupin routinely invades the privacy of mysteries, intentions, and minds. In his aggressive penetrations, Poe asks, what distinguishes the impulsive killer from his reserved, ruthless pursuer? Who is the sovereign, and who is the slave? * * * Poe would attempt to answer that question by responding to the contest over the annexation of Texas. While the confrontation with Mexico seemed far removed from the streets of Manhattan, the nationalist fervor

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went to the heart of Poe’s preoccupation with sovereignty. Poe had left Philadelphia determined to erase the humiliating failures of an abortive patronage appointment and a declaration of bankruptcy. Soon embraced by Evert Duyckinck and the advocates for Young America, he saw a new edition of his tales published in Wiley and Putnam’s Library of American Books, placed his most celebrated poem, “The Raven,” in the Evening Mirror, and became a principal owner of a new weekly, the Broadway Journal. Yet despite these achievements his life and career seemed to be spinning out of control. He often drank excessively, picked fights with editors and authors, and feigned illness when professional or pecuniary demands became too severe. Suffering from writer’s block, he embarrassed himself in Boston by droning through the jejune “Al Aaraaf” and alienating his audience. Daily he witnessed his wife, Virginia’s worsening illness, and despite his newfound celebrity as the subject of an admiring profile by James Russell Lowell, he was barely solvent. “I have made no money,” he complained to Frederick Thomas; “I am as poor now as ever I was in my life.” After working fifteen-hour days without compensation, he was forced to admit that business “has made of me … a slave.”43 Like Maelzel’s chess player, Poe was both a master and an abject tool. The travails in Texas were thus a grotesque emblem of his own bitter ordeal. After nearly a decade of recession, John O’Sullivan’s proclamation of manifest destiny in a July 1845 article on the annexation of Texas was a definitive assertion of sovereignty. Not only would the measure acknowledge the legitimate wishes of an independent republic, but by fulfilling treaty rights negotiated with Mexico two decades earlier it would also trigger exponential growth. Only complete a transcontinental railroad, O’Sullivan predicted, and the nation’s population could easily increase tenfold in a century, throwing off the dominance of England as revolutionary Texas had rejected Mexico. Although political economists worried that annexation would disrupt cotton markets, still rattled by the Panic, O’Sullivan looked forward to an agricultural boom accompanied by an equally lucrative resumption of the internal slave trade. “The greater value” of forced labor in the new territory, he predicted, would have the same propulsive effect as the “unvarying law that bids water descend the slope that invites it.”44 Almost immediately, Texas would rejuvenate the upper South by trading hard cash for its most valuable commodity. Like rail transport and a proposed trans-oceanic canal in the Yucatan peninsula, the circulation of slaves would reinvigorate a stagnant economy.

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Yet O’Sullivan’s sanguine assumptions were far from universal. Perhaps more worrisome than the constitutional question, noted above, were the human costs of annexation—the legions of aliens who would now summarily enter the polity. Texas was not merely an independent republic, congressmen warned; it was a pest house with a mongrel populace. “[F]oreigners,” declared New Jersey Senator William Dayton, “would come without any probation or guards into the fruition of citizenship.” “Mexican peasants and Indians”—even the “negro population”—would overwhelm the nation’s rightful sovereigns.45 The flood tide of slavery drawn to the region would only magnify the threat. “What, then, was New York to do,” demanded Representative George Rathbun, in the face of a menacing new slave power? “Commit suicide on this floor?” (176). Even Southerners like Tennessean Ephraim Foster were forced to admit that “Slavery was … like the shirt of Nessus”—torturous and inescapable (360). Texas thus presented the twin paradox of fecundity and terror—a powerful stimulus achieved through a horrific menace. To many, the expanded republic suggested not a glorious union but a venomous plague, turning would-be sovereigns into victims. Such clashing assessments necessarily produced dialectical images to which Poe would be particularly drawn. Many accounts of the region expressed the utopian enthusiasm of a well-ordered plenum. “We marched through a wilderness of mesquite and acacia thickets,” wrote William Seaton Henry, a captain in the Mexican campaign of 1846; “the grass was rich; the peavine, with its delicate blossom abundant, … and every thing … appeared so happy that it was perfectly exhilarating.”46 George Kendall, who toured the region five years earlier, marveled at the “tranquillity” of a mountain prospect, so profound “it … seemed as though it had never been broken.”47 Yet the idyllic land could also be fatal. Kendall gives a vivid counter-image of a wildfire igniting the prairie, turning the vista into a flaming “sea of molten gold”—as if avarice itself were consuming the landscape (1:95). But settlers were also incendiary. During a forced, frigid march through barren territory at the hands of a sadistic Mexican officer, Kendall’s band kept warm by burning the withered grass, so that “[a]s tuft after tuft would fall away at the touch of the fire, the wild group would hurry on to others, soon kindle them, and they in turn would … blaze for a few moments and then as suddenly expire” (2:2). In such images, American appetite laid waste the very land it intended to claim. Characteristically, the rhetoric of annexation often turned on the efficacy of a regional police, broadly conceived, that would preserve the

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idyllic order. Opponents of the measure claimed that those who sought to extend slavery were “a race of monsters … more unappeasable … than hyenas.”48 Abolitionist congressman Joshua Giddings pointed to the South’s “exhausted plantations” (169) as a species of the ruin awaiting Texas, if not the Union. The “gigantic energies” of the “beautiful and smiling” young republic, urged Kentucky’s James Morehead, must be jealously guarded, lest its glories be tarnished by the “violence or perversion” (282) of foreign adventure. Yet those very fears provided the most potent brief for annexation. With an advocate’s grim logic, Ohio Representative Ezra Dean claimed that the history of the nation was one long suppression of violence and perversion by violent and perverse means, beginning with New England’s decimation of its indigenes and proceeding, “tribe by tribe … till we reached the shores of the Pacific” (122). Why should discipline stop at the Mississippi? Illinois Democrat Orlando Ficklin rushed to agree. Both “[t]he ferocious and untutored Indian” and the “barbarous and cruel Mexican” would league in a “war of extermination” against defenseless Americans, he warned. “Does not the blood of Crockett and his companions in arms ‘cry to us from the ground’ for revenge”? (183). Indiana Democrat Robert Owen put the case in bald terms. When the aliens’ dark deeds cast a “pall over the entire land,” shall true Americans respond, “Let them perish”? Such is not “the language—[or] the spirit— of young America,” whose law is more “holy … than the law of the statute book” (121). The preservation of American purity demanded deep reserves of righteous violence. These claims did not go unnoticed in the burgeoning New York literary scene that Poe joined in 1844. After working briefly at George Morris and N. P. Willis’s Weekly Mirror, he was recruited by Charles Briggs for the new Broadway Journal. While the Journal was reputedly an organ for Young America—the July 19, 1845 issue dutifully ran a lengthy account of a stump speech by Cornelius Mathews—the pragmatic, hard-nosed pursuit of profit and readers made ideological commitments fluid. Both Poe and William Gilmore Simms, for example, published in the Democratic Review and in its archrival, the Whig American Review, and Duyckinck’s genteel circle often found itself at odds with O’Sullivan’s more strident appeal. Yet the Journal’s cosmopolitan tone and its emphasis on the arts allowed it to skirt partisanship while supporting cultural independence, and it was this cautious stance that made Texas a resonant metaphor. In the comments, reviews, and tales published by the New York journals, Poe sensed a test of loyalty, a warning, and an object lesson in the limits of

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sovereignty. Deploying and distorting the rhetoric of annexation, and exploiting his ambiguous position as the critical mouthpiece for a movement he only partially supported, Poe used the reviews and revised tales he published in the Journal to craft a final response to a gothic market that grew by devouring its subjects. Slavery was the corrupt sign for that devil’s bargain. Years of overheated rhetoric on copyright had primed New York writers to reckon with annexation. For Young America, the protection of American authors was more than a legal claim; it was a fight for moral purity. In 1843, Mathews, along with William Cullen Bryant and Francis Hawks, founded the American Copyright Club and published a manifesto. An Address to the People of the United States in Behalf of the American Copyright Club, which Poe endorsed, not only laid out the case for international copyright, but did so with the pious zeal demanded by the people’s welfare.49 While maintaining that “a book is an equal property with any other estate” (5) and should therefore be accorded the full protection of the law, they warned that the real danger derived from the “noxious character” of “foreign tongues” (10). Overwhelmed by “a race of the trashiest publications … that the slime of cities ever bred” (10–11), the undiscerning reader has little choice but to carry the “poison” back home into the corporate body, tainting “blood and character for generations to come” (11). “Cheap literature” invades the country like a microbe, causing native publications to “deca[y] and withe[r],” and thus advancing America’s “deadliest enemy” (11). The hyperbole suggests that the case for copyright had become entangled in larger concerns about restoring moral balance and order after a crippling recession. Meredith McGill has shown how a rift with O’Sullivan exposed the more pervasive anxieties driving that appeal.50 Whereas the Copyright Club demanded the kinds of protection afforded to staples and manufactures in the domestic market, O’Sullivan advocated free trade, with the market itself adjudicating demand. If American writers produced superior works, American firms would have no choice but to publish them, and prices would take care of themselves. Only if publishers are allowed “to range over the broad and rich field” of English letters will they have the wherewithal to support an authentic American literature.51 Ducykinck’s rejection of this stance drew him to the American Review, where, in “Literary Prospects of 1845,” he inveighed against the invasion of “cheap and nasty” imports. The defense of “native authors,” he claimed, “may be as well worth talking about as the acquisition of Texas.”52 For Duyckinck, as for his literary allies, international copyright entailed a

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return to the legal protections for property owners that had been waning everywhere in American jurisprudence except in the paternalistic defense of slavery.53 His call for American purity was of a piece with the rhetoric of annexation, and, indeed, with the darker aspects of manifest destiny itself. Poe’s claim that he was living like a slave was thus both a bathetic protest and an ardent wish. Above all, he wanted to be safe. Far from taking a militant or rigorous political stance, the magazine fictions associated with Texas in 1845 attempt to impose a kind of aesthetic order. Like a resistant novel or epic poem, the region betrayed an elusiveness in need of clarification. Producing that order was crucial to these coterie writers, for the problem posed a test of their critical skills, and hence of their cultural authority. While others debated the constitutional or moral limits of annexation, Young America discerned an allegory of infinitation—of multiplying signs crying out for a supreme fiction or a supreme will. In this emergency the New Yorkers had a ready, time-worn solution: the elitist safety associated with protection and privilege to which the literati would lend a guiding hand. Extracting Texas from Mexico was as crucial as securing international copyright or advancing American art: all looked forward to the cleansing of the republic through the restoration of a plenary ideal. The Texas tales published by the Duyckinck circle conveyed safety through a studied urbanity. Wading into a new territory, the writers attempted to subdue this promiscuous borderland through the combination of wit and discernment that characterized their appraisals of drawing room New York. In the series “Travels in Texas” appearing in the short-­ lived Aristidean, for example—a series Poe praised in the Journal54—the peace of an idyllic settlement on the banks of the Trinity River is broken by an Indian raid, provoking a fierce pursuit and the death of a child. “By scenes such as this was our pioneer life diversified,” observes the narrator—diversified, not destroyed. “It is impossible to realize how tame and flat the very highest excitements of civilized life appear, to one who has lived … [on] a dangerous Frontier.”55 Yet the dangers uniformly yield to narrative facility. Absent from this Texas travelogue is the conflict between pastoral beauty and carceral decay, and the merciless promiscuity of the frontier betrays a comforting order. Hunting hundreds of buffalo stampeding in a “roaring, shouting and shaking” confused mass provokes the narrator to reflect on his own “delirium … during which I suppose I was guilty of any amount of extravagancies, in the way of furious spurring, miscellaneous firing and yelling,” and to recognize that his “helter-skelter

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sally” produced only wild shots and few carcasses (96). With the placidity of an after-dinner anecdote, the narrator converts the fearsome episode into a curious recognition of order. Another tale with Melvillean overtones conveys a similar message. “Metaphysics of Bear Hunting” depicts Texas as a “Paradise of Monsters”; “the vicious, the desperate, the social and civil Outlaws of all the World had been gathered there.”56 The tale, like the lurid accounts of Texas in Congress, is one long encounter with monsters—the bears, Comanches, and panthers that progressively isolate and prepare this religious skeptic for the grace of God. Yet while the frontier humbles him, it also enhances his sense of command, the sensation of holding life “in complete dependence upon one’s prompt right-­ arm” (174). The key, as his insouciant tone suggests, is a kind of natural pliability copied from the frontier itself. The mongrel confusion of the territory yields almost effortlessly to the virtuosity of its occupiers, who wore “a singular amalgamation of Mexican, Indian, and American costumes,” and bore arms “of almost every conceivable stamp” (176). This genteel roadmap to dominance was a fixture of Young American accounts of Texas, appearing as well in the serialized “Adventures on the Frontier of Texas and Mexico,” Charles Winterfield’s urbane travelogue published, in six parts, in the American Review from 1845–1846. Such texts, in the words of Frederic Jameson, attempted to “square [the] circles” of cultural contradiction, imagining, through sheer amalgamation, solutions to intractable problems.57 Yet the roadmap was not universal. Significantly, in February 1845, a revenge tale of “border life” by C. Wilkins Eimi appeared simultaneously in the Democratic and American Review. “The Shot in the Eye”—titled “Jack Long” in the Whig journal—recounts the failure of frontier accommodation, as a complacent Texan Natty Bumppo, “Lynch[ed]” (roughed up) and demonized by a band of lawless regulators, becomes a lone, merciless avenger engaged in “war to the knife.”58 Although he is not permanently altered by the vendetta—Eimi is no Melville—Jack Long literally haunts American gentility by refusing the benign order of the landscape. For Jack Long, as for Poe, there is little distance between sovereignty and murder. * * * To its harried editor, the failure of the Broadway Journal was both a consummation and a judgment. Poe had come closer than he ever would to his dream of owning a literary magazine, one stocked with serious

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criticism and belles lettres and that, by the end of its run, was a showcase for his own best work. But the year with the Journal had also brought on a severe depression tied to Virginia’s tuberculosis and the venture’s fading prospects, conditions that must have sharpened his distaste for the political and literary absolutism of Young America. As Poe recognized, the matter of Texas was a metaphor for the cultural contradictions he had explored throughout his career. Once again, he confronted the irresolvable contest between idealism and despair; the quest for purity incited and undermined by a pervasive fear of danger; and, above all, the normative contradictions of slavery, the shadow world that twisted language and haunted his fiction. Poe wrote no new stories for the Journal, yet his selection and arrangement of canonical works suggest a vivid counterpoint—a dialectical challenge—to the pieties of his editors and associates. Typically, Poe’s characters try and fail to make sense of a world in which they are dominated and maligned, at times offering faint glimpses of utopian havens, more often succumbing to madness or dissolution. The jaggedness of their experience, however, owes less to the aberrations of morality or market than to the violent norms of purity surrounding annexation and slavery. Like Texas, Poe’s twice-told tales are intimate borderlands in which lives and language are hollowed out and subverted in a ruinous pursuit of sovereignty. Poe’s assault on sovereignty centered on the fake pieties of the literary world itself, including the pieties of his current sponsors. His five sketches of public enterprise—“The Man That Was Used Up,” “The Literary Life of Thingum Bob, Esq.,” “How to Write a Blackwood Article,” “The Business Man,” and “Some Passages in the Life of a Lion”—contain some of his most savage satire. If public power, as General A. B. C. Smith demonstrates, is nothing more than a tissue of artifice, and the literary life of Thingum Bob simply an act of plagiarism, the cause lies in the violent association of contingency and desire. Poe’s Business Man is a prime example. His success is one long and labored confidence game, rooted in and justified by the vagaries of a market that destroyed so many lives. Poe’s savvy protagonist is most devastating in denouncing what he calls “genius” (2:49)—the Emersonian will to pursue one’s calling. The merchant or manufacturer, the cotton trader or lawyer—even the magazinist himself— is merely deluded if he thinks success is self-made. The past decade had proved beyond doubt that success is momentary and meaningless, a mere husk or form that the narrator mocks by an unwavering commitment to “method” (49), even if his bookkeeping and business plans are frauds. His

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idea of a shrewd real estate deal is to block a large developer with a hovel to induce a hefty payoff. Such “strict integrity, economy, and rigorous business habits” made him a “marked man” on Wall Street, he declares (50)—a target, as his fortunes decline and he takes up accident fraud, mud-slinging, and mutilating animals for pay, all with strict propriety. The source of criminality, as Poe makes clear in “The Life of a Lion,” is not the speaker’s perversity but the deep structure of the market. The secret of his art, the Lion proudly reveals, is his propensity to display and fondle his prominent “proboscis” glorified in a best-seller on “Nosology” (1:165). This confluence of masturbation and disease marks not only Poe’s most acute attack on literary “method” but also on celebrations of western lands and slavery. All use the containment of disease and impurity as covers for illicit desire. Poe is often portrayed as caught in the grip of such illicit forces. In psychobiographical readings like Kenneth Silverman’s,59 his fascination with gothic terror and the imp of the perverse are expressions of grief, rage, and despair arising from the death of his parents, John Allan’s indifference, and a boundless self-pity. Yet the tales in the Broadway Journal reveal a more reflective self-awareness, one that acknowledges both the hunger for dominance and security and the perversity of that desire. As a Southerner serving New York masters, Poe could not fail to recognize that slavery was more than a distant status or a literary trope; it was the basis of his language and art. Poe makes this case in an extended dialectic. His tales undermine sovereignty and long, with an almost erotic intensity, for a utopian alternative. Yet his narrators inevitably recognize that there is no safe haven and lash out with redoubled violence, attempting to exercise a dominance already weakened by self-division. Slavery is the sign and symbol for that treacherous divide. Like the dubious success stories of his fictional impostors, sovereignty, in Poe’s anthology of Journal pieces, often seems illusory. The narrator’s exclamation in “The Pit and the Pendulum”—“Free!—and in the grasp of the Inquisition!” (1:311)—may serve as an emblem of his thought. “I saw—I felt that I had perfect command of my senses” (2:316), declares Augustus Bedloe in “A Tale of the Ragged Mountains,” moments before he hallucinates a scene of violent resistance to the British in Benares, India, a half-century before. “All was rigorously self-consistent” (2:317), he claims, and yet Bedloe, a lifelong neurasthenic, is also supremely responsive to mesmerism, cast under a spell “almost instantaneously, by the mere volition of the operator” (315). The sovereign gaze, like the chess-playing

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Turk, is thus deeply compromised. Both the tragic lover in “The Assignation” and the crazed widower in “Ligeia” assert their command through a marshaling of objects proclaiming and assailing their virtù. While the treasures in the lover’s “regal cabinet” would provoke a “rage” (1:359) in Europe were they widely known, ownership has marginalized him, rendering the lover a kind of cloistered object in turn. The very intensity of his acquisitiveness seems sinister, as revolting, suggests the narrator, as the “adders which writhe from out the eyes of the grinning masks in the cornices around the temples of Persepolis” (359). Reflection, like his thwarted will, has turned him to stone. All of this riotous splendor is a gorgeous frame for a veiled portrait of the Marchesa Aphrodite, trapped, like a “Roman statue” amid the treasures that imprison her (360). In this regard the lover’s opulent cabinet suggests a possessiveness as ruinous as that exerted by Aphrodite’s malevolent husband, or by Ligeia’s widower, whose bedroom is a living tomb. In these settings, the boundary between persons and objects wavers and disappears, as it does for General Smith, who is “himself” nothing but a collection of used parts. Hence at a dinner party among Smith’s acolytes, the guests dispute whether Byron’s tragedy is called “Man-Fred” or “Man-Friday” (2:70)—the expression of sovereign resistance or of abject servitude. The habit of command, these tales reveal, is as fragile and fleeting as the power of a washed-up amputee. In “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire,” Benjamin attributed this suborned sovereignty to a perverse absorption in things, the world of subversive commodities, siphoning agency in the “boundless desolation” of advanced capitalism.60 Poe, as we have seen, has another explanation, one that becomes clear in the horror tales he chooses to reprint amid the national debate on slavery. Literally surrounded by darkness, his narrators attempt to make sense of their own debilitating milieu, yet the means, the materials, and the modes of expression constantly evade them. Their stifling medium is not merely the abject world of commodities, but the miasma of slavery, corrupting and distorting all values. Once again, the narrator of “The Pit and the Pendulum” sets the scene. Echoing Charles Brockden Brown’s Edgar Huntly—the story of another violent borderland character—the prisoner remarks on “[t]he intensity of the darkness [that] seemed to oppress and stifle me.” Yet if he were not dead, “in what state was I?” (1:308). To the haunted speaker in “Eleonora,” there are two modes of thought: that of “lucid reason” and “a condition of shadow and doubt” verging on madness (1:323). Amid such shadows, how could lucid reason endure? While these expressions of gothic sensibility are inescapable in

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Poe’s art, they also reflect the anonymous terror of a market that can turn subjects into helpless victims no more sovereign than slaves. In “Shadow—A Parable,” as in “King Pest,” both reprinted in the Journal, a group of friends retreating from the plague cannot keep out an unwanted guest. The intruding shadow “was vague, and formless, and indefinite,” Poe comments with biblical solemnity, “for the tones in the voice of the shadow were not … of any one being, but of a multitude of beings” (1:342). Death, the shadowy power defeating all sovereignty, is also the empty place occupied by everyone and no one, as it is the marketplace asserting its invisible mastery. Here, once again, the “clock of ebony” in the black room of the Red Death (2:17), the room “as black as pitch” of the tell-tale heart (2:97), the “blackest shade” marking the Island of the Fay (2:189) suggest the sepulchral rhythm of a lurid power defying the most settled designs. Poe’s allegorical account of the fays’ dissolution might double as a statement of political economy: In dying, do they not … waste away mournfully; rendering … little by little their existence, as these trees render up shadow after shadow, exhausting their substances unto dissolution. (189–90)

In a milieu in which American designs embraced the continent, Poe reminded his readers that bodies became objects in life as well as in death. The writer who felt himself a slave was producing a kind of spiritual account of his inner intellectual history, trying, perhaps, through such dire analogies to preserve a freedom of his own. Poe’s deployment of both “Eleonora” and “The Island of the Fay” speaks directly to the divided assessments of Texas he read in journals like the Aristidean and reported to his readers. Such bifurcated landscapes harked back to the dialectical portraits of Virginia he lampooned in the Southern Literary Messenger—at once flourishing and dangerous, privileged and decaying. In “Eleonora” the cherished vale of Enos in which the two companions exchange eternal vows reads like a parody of the rhapsodic accounts conveyed by territorial travelers. So deep and tranquil is the region’s river that “[n]o murmur arose from its bed” and it “lay in a motionless content … shining on gloriously forever” (1:323). Unlike the erotic violence of the Graham’s piece “A Maiden’s Adventure,” in which a cabin’s narrow entrance is choked with corpses, this landscape is impregnable: “No path was trodden in its vicinity; and … there was need of putting back, with force, the foliage of many thousands of forest trees, and

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of … many millions of fragrant flowers” (323). Poe’s fairy island offers a similar scene, of “one vast animate and sentient whole” (2:188) guided by the “sovereign” sun (189). Augustus Bedloe, in Virginia’s Ragged Mountains, wanders into a region whose “solitude seemed absolutely virgin,” undoubtedly inviolate “by the foot of a human being” (2:316). These regions of plenty—of the plenum—are the antitheses of the empty places, the shadowlands roiling Poe’s tales and haunting a polity ever more vulnerable to foreign influence. They were realms of purity and safety through which spokesmen for Young America and the Copyright Club could still imagine an unassailable authority. In his literary criticism, Poe often invoked this world. In an 1842 review of Longfellow’s Ballads and Other Poems in Graham’s Magazine, he famously described true poetry as “a wild effort to reach the beauty above,” one that seeks out the elusive “crystal springs” of immortality (20:248). R.  H. Horne’s epic poem Orion, the subject of an 1844 Graham’s review, suggests that consummation by imagining a landscape where the “shadow of a stag” “unceasingly … drinks” from a stream until “the sun hath vanished utterly.” Here Orion’s own mastery and prescience are conveyed through a figure of natural repose, disclosing “the loftiest and holiest attributes” of a “true Poetry” (24:140) shadowed by sober mortality. Yet Poe’s evocation of a purified realm—even a purified literary realm—was never unqualified. In the Longfellow review he argues that the vain desire for supernal beauty must be experienced only through wan and insubstantial images, “as the eyes of Amaryllis are repeated in the mirror” (20:248)—Amaryllis, the self-immolating lover whose blood dyed the flowers. Even the greatest poets, Poe implies, must acknowledge this painful borderland, where rapture and ruin abide. This was the unsettled terrain on which Poe fought his extended battle with Longfellow in early 1845. In “The Paris of the Second Empire in Baudelaire,” Benjamin argues that the hallmark of authentic poetry is a “fantastic battle” with objects in which the act of writing becomes a duel.61 For the traumatophile this is no metaphor: it is a literal description of the shocks that must be absorbed and conveyed in the course of writing, and of the labor required to parry the worst blows. The poet’s success against such “violence” must be measured by the “continual series of tiny improvisations” through which he asserts a fragile mastery (40–41). “We are willing to take any position to serve our friends,” proclaimed the Weekly Mirror in an afterward to Poe’s initial attack on Longfellow as a “thief”; if the journal agrees to “shew another’s ‘skill of fence,’” it is only to preserve

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an open “field” for the better wielding of weapons.62 That field, Poe recognized, did double duty. On the one hand, Poe’s extended assault, revealing the same prosecutorial fire he demonstrated in assailing Maelzel’s hoax, defends the sanctity of the poetic principle as it echoes, in its swelling indignation, the outrage of the Copyright Club denouncing foreign influence. Contributing to that outrage, as critics have often observed, may well have been the wealthy Longfellow’s outspoken abolitionism, a moral superiority that must have disturbed the “enslaved” Poe, who longed for an undivided sovereignty. “We should as soon expect to see our old friend, SATAN, presiding at a temperance meeting,” Poe outrageously declares, “as to see a veritable poem—of his own—composed by … Professor LONGFELLOW” (ER 761). But the thrusts and parries between Poe and his presumptive critic, “Outis,” whose very designation as “Nobody” was a figure of reification, underscored the impossibility of establishing purity or even independence for a magazinist whose every word was a commodity. “[T]he poetic sentiment,” Poe is finally forced to concede, implies “a longing for … assimilation, or absorption” in objects and language, a desire so acute that one is “possessed” by others (Journal 1:212). Given the poet’s myriad influences, each poem may be nothing more than an intricate tissue of tiny improvisations. This sensuous absorption in influences returns us to the paternalist fiction of the contented slave yielding to the will of the master and to the empty place of politics, but it is also a commercial figure of exchange, like Benjamin’s figure of allegory, in which independence vanishes and any relationship can mean absolutely anything else. Poe’s fencer seems to have battled to a draw. In this context, Poe’s reprinting of “A Tale of the Ragged Mountains” serves as a rejoinder to the review of Ballads and Other Poems, conveying an allegory of the fallen world that Poe both derided and craved. The tale, which has been described both as a statement of Poe’s Toryism and of his anti-imperialism,63 appeared near the end of his tenure as editor of the Journal, and its strange, almost mechanical transformations give it a heightened artificiality quite close to satirical pieces like “Loss of Breath” or “The Man That Was Used Up.” Christina Zwarg may come closest to Poe’s intent when she describes the work as a figuration of history and trauma disclosing “global networks” of pain,64 yet the tale, in its improvisation on Charles Brockden Brown’s Edgar Huntly, also figures a stubborn American violence that Poe had been assessing throughout his career. Most tellingly, the hallucinatory and ambiguous self-command of the protagonist, Augustus Bedloe, calls into question the sovereign gaze crucial

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to the annexation of Texas, and to the nationalist project announced by Young America. Yet the plasticity of the time-traveling Bedloe, and his reinvestment in the body of an English predecessor named Oldeb, who fought under Warren Hastings at Benares, suggest that Bedloe is also an embodiment of that general equivalence dissolving all bodies and things in a market economy—the continuous reanimation and disruption that proved a wonder and a terror to Poe and his contemporaries. More clearly than almost any other story Poe wrote, “A Tale of the Ragged Mountains” demonstrates the haunting power of the empty place, the violent contingency of everyday life in a democratic regime. Initially Poe’s “Tale” seems to be another sum of mismatched parts. The wealthy protagonist, whose neurological disorder has made him a morphine addict and led him to employ a private physician named Templeton, takes a customary stroll in the hills above Charlottesville, Virginia, where he has a series of epiphanies. First, wholly responsive to the landscape in this warm “Indian Summer” (2:316), he relishes every leaf, insect, and dewdrop, through which he imagines “a whole universe of suggestion” (316). The sudden appearance of a mysterious “half-naked man” pursued by a “beast” or “monster” (316) transports him to a distant region, a foreign city that he surveys with the same microscopic intensity. Soon he is engulfed in a skirmish with subcontinental Indian attackers, wounded by a poisoned arrow, and involved in a mysterious death and revival. It is Templeton who remarks on the uncanny similarity between Bedloe and the doctor’s English friend, killed at Benares—a kinship that becomes a terrifying identity when Bedloe, too, dies of poisoning from a medicinal leech. While the newspaper merely announces his tragic death, the narrator perceives an unsettling transmigration of souls. Like many of Poe’s most acute forensic fictions, “A Tale of the Ragged Mountains” seems to celebrate its clumsiness. The transition between Virginia and India appears labored and obvious. The influence of Templeton—whose mesmerism may have induced Bedloe’s crisis, possibly to reanimate the doctor’s deceased friend—seems unconvincing and melodramatic. Yet the very messiness of the tale suggests an ambition and a range almost unique in Poe’s fiction. An author whose fondness for Europe made him suspect in Young America reaches beyond the continent to imperial England in a manner that challenges the designs of American expansionists as well. But the time traveling is more than a magician’s trick or a metaphysical ruse; the scene from “1780” (318; actually August

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1781) and a world away signifies, with a perverse twist, the invasion of the market through Bedloe’s almost Whitmanesque panorama of Benares: On every hand was a wilderness of balconies, of verandahs, of minarets, of shrines, and fantastically carved oriels. Bazaars abounded; and in these were displayed rich wares in infinite variety and profusion—silks, muslins, the most dazzling cutlery, the most magnificent jewels and gems. Besides these things, were seen, on all sides, banners and palanquins, litters with stately dames close veiled, elephants, gorgeously caparisoned, idols grotesquely hewn, drums, banners, and gongs, spears, silver and gilded maces. And amid the crowd, and the clamor, and the general intricacy and confusion—amid the million of black and yellow men, turbaned and robed, … there roamed a countless multitude of holy filleted bulls, while vast legions of the filthy but sacred ape clambered, chattering and shrieking, about the cornices of the mosques, or clung to the minarets and oriels. (316–17)

Here Bedloe’s minute particularity recalls the narrator of “The Man of the Crowd,” whose cityscapes betray a lurking, erotic, and anonymous criminality, as it does Madison’s immense catalogue of political adversaries in Federalist No. 38 and the fears of alien hordes voiced during the annexation debates. From a wilderness retreat Bedloe has been pitched into the very heart of commercial and political excess. Yet the corruption in Bedloe’s vision is actually more sinister, since, as Boyd Carter notes, Poe borrowed heavily here—would plagiarized by too strong a word?—from Brown’s shape-shifting novel Edgar Huntly, whose hero also penetrates a presumably virgin wilderness, plunges into an “abyss,” and emerges a killing machine.65 That Poe’s protagonist, “Bedloe,” is a palindrome for Templeton’s friend Oldeb makes the borrowing deeply ironic, since it is the Indian hermit and necromancer Old Deb who incites the bloody rebellion that sweeps up Huntly. Through these convergences, Poe attacks American savagery in all its forms, including the merciless fiction of the sovereign will. When Bedloe imagines—or hallucinates—or assumes—the body and corpse of an alien, has he not been rendered an object, suffered social death, and emerged a slave? Is not mesmerism, like capital—perhaps like fiction itself—the most corrupting of all influences? Poe’s final answer to that question attempts to imagine a realm of beauty impervious to influence. In “The Domain of Arnheim” (1847), a revision of his earlier “The Landscape Garden” that appeared in the Broadway Journal (2:161–64), the narrator recounts the visionary splendor of the impossibly wealthy Ellison, who has engineered a paradise on

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Earth.66 As the visitor approaches the domain through a narrow gorge— kin both to the protected glade in “Eleonora” and to the scene of Bedloe’s epiphany—he is entranced by a sudden and overwhelming uniformity, a landscape of perfect “symmetry” swept of every dead branch, withered leaf, and stray stone. Yet the limpid scene, chaste as the vistas of Edwin Church or Thomas Cole, is but a vestibule to Ellison’s consummatory vision. Entering an ivory canoe guided without oars by a soothing river, the visitor is conducted, almost automatically, to a vast and gleaming “amphitheatre” of purple mountains, “lily-fringed lakes,” and “semi-­ Saracenic architecture” gleaming in the setting sun (869–70). The haven, “not far from a populous city” (864), is a utopian rejoinder to the Ragged Mountains, yet it is not immune to Virginia’s shadows. The canoe, emblem of a vanished people, provides the means of rebirth through the region’s narrow “chasm” (866), as the inspired observer surveys an empty place— lawful, harmonious, depopulated, cleansed. Poe’s dream of a safe harbor bears the telltale traces of a world subdued, protected from the market and the masses yet alien and empty, pristine yet chastened by the sovereign gaze. Through such ambivalent visions, he implies, American prospects, too, might yet be secured, rendered whole by the dark, invisible hand of a strategist whose every move is a warning, a wound, and a command.

Notes 1. Southern Literary Messenger 2 (1836): 318–26. In most cases, I will use the original journal in which Poe’s work first appeared or was reprinted. Citations will be given parenthetically in the text, and indicated, where necessary, by SLM. All journals are available online through Hathitrust.org. 2. Terence Whalen, Edgar Allan Poe and the Masses: The Political Economy of Literature in Antebellum America (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999). 3. See, for example, Betsy Erkklia, “Perverting the American Renaissance: Poe, Democracy, Critical Theory,” Poe and the Remapping of Antebellum Print Culture, ed. J. Gerald Kennedy and Jerome McGann (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2012), 65–100; Peter Coviello, “Poe in Love: Pedophilia, Morbidity, and the Logic of Slavery,” ELH 70 (2003): 875–901; Joan Dayan, “Amorous Bondage: Poe, Ladies, and Slaves,” American Literature 66 (1994): 239–73; Dayan, “Poe, Persons, and Property,” American Literary History 11 (1999): 405–25; Erkkila, “The Poetics of Whiteness: Poe and the Racial Imaginary,” Romancing the Shadow: Poe and Race, ed. J.  Gerald Kennedy and Liliane Weissberg

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(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 41–74; Jared Gardner, Master Plots: Race and the Founding of an American Literature, 1787–1845 (Baltimore, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998), 125–59; Lesley Ginsberg, “Slavery and the Gothic Horror of Poe’s ‘The Black Cat,’” American Gothic: New Interventions in a National Narrative, ed. Robert Martin and Eric Savoy (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1998), 99–128; Maurice Lee, Slavery, Philosophy, and American Literature, 1830–1860 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 14–51; Ed White, “The Ourang-Outang Situation,” College Literature 30 (2003): 88–108; Sam Worley, “The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym and the Ideology of Slavery,” ESQ 40 (1994): 219–50; Jonathan Elmer, Reading at the Social Limit: Affect, Mass Culture, and Edgar Allan Poe (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995); Leland Person, “Poe’s Philosophy of Amalgamation: Reading Racism in the Tales,” Romancing the Shadow, 205–24; Teresa Goddu, “Poe, Sensationalism, and Slavery,” The Cambridge Companion to Edgar Allan Poe, ed. Kevin Hayes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 92–112; and Dana Nelson, The Word in Black and White: Reading “Race” in American Literature, 1638–1867 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 90–108. For a cogent review of the first wave of social approaches to Poe, see Scott Peeples, The Afterlife of Edgar Allan Poe (Rochester: Camden House, 2004), 93–123. 4. John Calhoun, “Exposition and Protest,” Union and Liberty: The Political Philosophy of John C. Calhoun, ed. Ross Lence (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1992), https://oll.libertyfund.org/title/calhoun-­union-­and-­liberty-­the-­ political-­philosophy-­of-­john-­c-­calhoun (initially accessed 12/24/2015). Citations will be given parenthetically in the text. 5. Elizabeth Varon, Disunion!: The Coming of the American Civil War, 1789–1859 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008). 6. Appendix to the Register of Debates in Congress, 22nd Congress, 2nd Session, vol. 9, part 2 (Washington, D.C.: Gales and Seaton, 1833), 151. Subsequent citations will be given parenthetically in the text. 7. The Statutes at Large and Treaties of the United States of America, ed. George Minot and George Sanger (Boston: Little, Brown, 1859), 11: 776, 777. 8. Richard Ellis, The Union at Risk: Jacksonian Democracy, States’ Rights, and the Nullification Crisis (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), 78. 9. Proceedings and Debates of the Virginia State Convention of 1829–30 (Richmond: Samuel Shepherd for Ritchie and Cook, 1830), 29. Subsequent citations will be given parenthetically in the text. The phrase “alter or abolish,” from the Virginia Declaration of Rights (1776), was heard repeatedly during the 1829–1830 convention. See, for example, Proceedings and Debates, 26.

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10. Alison Freehling, Drift Toward Dissolution: The Virginia Slavery Debate of 1831–1832 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1982), 77–78. Subsequent citations will be given parenthetically in the text. 11. Richmond Enquirer, January 24, 1832. Subsequent citations will be given parenthetically in the text. 12. Mary Young, Redskins, Ruffleshirts, and Rednecks: Indian Allotments in Alabama and Mississippi, 1830–1860 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1961), 49–113. See also Stuart Banner, How the Indians Lost Their Land: Law and Power on the Frontier (Cambridge: Belknap Press, 2005), 112–49. 13. The Cherokee Nation argument appears in The Case of the Cherokee Nation against the State of Georgia, ed. Richard Peters (Philadelphia: John Grigg, 1831), 33, 28. Subsequent citations will be given parenthetically in the text. On questions of sovereignty raised by the dispute, see also Ronald Satz, American Indian Policy in the Jacksonian Era (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1975), 3, 26, 54. 14. Reports of Cases Argued and Adjudged in the Supreme Court of the United States, January Term, 1831, ed. Richard Peters (Philadelphia: Grigg, 1831), 22. Subsequent citations will appear parenthetically in the text. 15. Tim Garrison, The Legal Ideology of Removal, 190. For Indian Removal, see also Patrick Wolfe, “After the Frontier: Separation and Absorption in US Indian Policy,” Settler Colonial Studies 1 (2011): 13–51; Alfred Cave, “Abuse of Power: Andrew Jackson and the Indian Removal Act of 1830,” The Historian 65 (2003): 1330–53; Anthony F.  C. Wallace, The Long, Bitter Trail: Andrew Jackson and the Indians (New York: Hill and Wang, 1993); Michael Paul Rogin, Fathers and Children: Andrew Jackson and the Subjugation of the American Indian (New York: Knopf, 1975); Dianna Everett, The Texas Cherokees: A People Between Two Fires, 1819–1840 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1990); and Gregory Smithers, The Cherokee Diaspora: An Indigenous History of Migration, Resettlement, and Identity (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2015), 93–145. On missionary activities among the Cherokee, see Emily Conroy-Krutz, Christian Imperialism, 102–120, 130–150. 16. Worcester v. Georgia, 31 U.S. 515 (1832), Reports of Cases Argued and Adjudged in the Supreme Court of The United States, January Term 1832, ed. Richard Peters (Philadelphia: Desilver, 1832), 519. Subsequent citations will be given parenthetically in the text. On Worcester, see also Garrison, Legal Ideology, 179–215. 17. Register of Debates, 22nd Cong., 1st sess., House, Appendix, 3105. Subsequent citations will be given parenthetically in the text. 18. Congressional Globe, 28th Cong., 2nd sess., House, 121. Subsequent citations will be given parenthetically in the text.

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19. Congressional Globe, 29th Cong., 1st sess., Senate, 98. 20. On resistance to racial others in Mexico, see also Reginald Horsman, Race and Manifest Destiny: The Origins of Racial Anglo-Saxonism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1981), 230–46. 21. Alisdair Roberts, America’s First Great Depression, 8. Citations from Roberts will be given parenthetically in the text. The account in this paragraph is shaped by both Roberts and Jessica Lepler, The Many Panics of 1837: People, Politics, and the Creation of a Transatlantic Financial Crisis (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013). See also Jerry Mashaw, Creating an Administrative Constitution, 164–170. For the Panic’s impact on the South, see Edward Baptist, The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism (New York: Basic Books, 2014), 271–78. Overviews of the antebellum economy appear in Douglass North, The Economic Growth of the United States, 1790–1860 (New York: Norton, 1966); Charles Sellers, The Market Revolution; Joshua Rothman, Flush Times and Fever Dreams: A Story of Capitalism and Slavery in the Age of Jackson (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2012); Steven Deyle, Carry Me Back: The Domestic Slave Trade in American Life (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005); and Calvin Schermerhorn, The Business of Slavery and the Rise of American Capitalism, 1815–1860 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2015). 22. Hunt’s Merchants’ Magazine 4 (1841): 415. 23. United States Magazine and Democratic Review 2 (April 1838): 7, 10. Subsequent citations will be given parenthetically in the text. 24. “Edgar A.  Poe: ‘Possessed of no Property,’” Prologue Magazine 47:3 (2015), Poe bankruptcy petition, Schedule B, National Archives, https:// www.archives.gov/publications/prologue/2015/fall/poe-­bankruptcy. html, accessed March 10, 2016. 25. Papers of Andrew Jackson, ed. Harold Moser, Daniel Feller et al., 10 vols. (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1980–), 5:334. 26. Citations are from The Poe Log: A Documentary Life of Edgar Allan Poe, 1809–1849, ed. Dwight Thomas and David Jackson (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1987), 216, 506–7. 27. Southern Literary Messenger 1 (1834–1835): 2. All citations, from the online resource, https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=iau.3185804 5698200&view=1up&seq=13, will be given, by volume and page, parenthetically in the text. 28. Walter Johnson, River of Dark Dreams, 217–22. 29. Proceedings and Debates of the Virginia State Convention, 133, 204. 30. Richmond Enquirer, January 19, 1832, p. 2. 31. Joseph Roach, Cities of the Dead: Circum-Atlantic Performance (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), 40–41.

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32. Richmond Enquirer, February 4, 1832. 33. Burton’s Gentleman’s Magazine 5 (1839): 322. 34. Citation appears in “The Visionary,” Southern Literary Messenger 1 (1835): 637. Subsequent citations will be given parenthetically in the text. 35. Poe revised “Ligeia” in 1842 for the unpublished “Phantasy Pieces.” Thomas Mabbott considers this version definitive. Citation appears in The Collected Works of Edgar Allan Poe, ed. Mabbott (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1978), 2:312. 36. Poe revised “The Man That Was Used Up” as well for Phantasy Pieces. See Collected Works 2:377. Citation is from Burton’s, 5 (1839): 66. Subsequent citations will be given parenthetically in the text. 37. Burton’s Gentleman’s Magazine 7 (1840): 268. Subsequent citations will be given parenthetically in the text. 38. Harry Levin, The Power of Blackness: Hawthorne, Poe, Melville (New York: Knopf, 1958), 160. 39. Burton’s Gentleman’s Magazine 5 (1839): 147. Subsequent citations will be given parenthetically in the text. 40. See Gavin Jones, “Poor Poe: On the Literature of Revulsion,” American Literary History 23 (2001): 1–18. 41. Graham’s Magazine 18 (1841): 167. Subsequent citations will be given parenthetically in the text. 42. See especially, White, “Ourang-Outang Situation.” 43. The Collected Letters of Edgar Allan Poe, ed. John Ostrum, Burton Pollin, and John Savoye, 3rd ed. (New York: Gordian Press, 2008), Letter 197 (May 4, 1845), 1:504; Poe to Frances Osgood, Letter 214, (late October 1845), 532. 44. John O’Sullivan, “Annexation,” United States Magazine and Democratic Review 17 (July/August 1845): 7. 45. Congressional Globe, House, 28th Congress, 2nd session, 332. Subsequent citations from this House session will be given parenthetically in the text. 46. William Henry Seaton, Campaign Sketches of the War with Mexico (New York: Harper, 1847), 62. 47. George Kendall, Narrative of the Texan Santa Fe Expedition, ed. Gerald Saxon and William Taylor, 2 vols. (1847; Dallas: Southern Methodist University Press, 2004), 1:116. Subsequent citations will be given parenthetically in the text. 48. Levi Woodbury, Congressional Globe, 28th Congress, 2nd Session, 299. Subsequent citations from this congressional session will be given parenthetically in the text. 49. An Address to the People of the United States in Behalf of the American Copyright Club (New York: Copyright Club, 1843). Citations will be given parenthetically in the text.

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50. Meredith McGill, “Poe, Literary Nationalism, and Authorial Identity,” The American Face of Edgar Allan Poe, ed. Shawn Rosenheim and Stephen Rachman (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), 285–87. On Poe’s relation with Young America, see also Claude Richard, “Poe and ‘Young America,’” Studies in Bibliography 21 (1968): 25–58. 51. John O’Sullivan, “The International Copyright Question,” The United States Magazine and Democratic Review 12 (1843): 117. 52. Evert Duyckinck, “Literary Prospects of 1845,” American Review 1 (1845): 148, 146. 53. Mark Tushnet argues that, by the early antebellum period, many Southern judges were protecting bondspeople against damage and even criminal claims. Mississippi Judge Francis Brooke, for example, reasoned that the communal value of the enslaved “cannot enter into the calculation of damages by a jury.” In an 1820 decision, North Carolina Chief Justice John Taylor wrote that “every individual in the community feels and understands” that a slave’s criminality “may be extenuated by acts … with a due regard to … the just claims of humanity, and to the supreme law, the safety of the citizens.” But, as Tushnet shows, such mitigations were less likely when bondspeople directly and violently challenged their paternalist masters. Conversely, during the same period, as Morton Horwitz demonstrates, Northern judges were increasingly abandoning the principle that the preservation of property rights trumped competition. Responding, in part, to the expansion of cotton milling in the Northeast, judges came to reject a prime assumption of the people’s welfare: avoiding injury to others in the use of personal property. The judicial duty to prevent harm now seemed an untenable restraint on trade. See Tushnet, The American Law of Slavery, 1810–1860: Considerations of Humanity and Interest (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981), 101; and Horwitz, The Transformation of American Law, 1780–1860 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1977), 21–22, 102. 54. Broadway Journal 2 (1845): 193. Poe touts the piece—undoubtedly a puff for the journal’s editor, Thomas Dunn English—as “one of the most interesting sketches we have seen in a year,” and also notes with approval both “Metaphysics of Bear Hunting” (Poe refers to the story as “San Saba Hills,” a phrase in the subtitle, “An Adventure in the San Saba Hills”), and the darker tale “Jack Long.” Citations from the Journal will be given parenthetically in the text. 55. “Travels in Texas,” Aristidean 1 (1845): 26. Subsequent citations will appear parenthetically in the text. 56. “Metaphysics of Bear Hunting,” American Review 2 (1845): 174. Subsequent citations will be given parenthetically in the text.

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57. Winterfield’s narrative appeared in the American Review 1 (1845): 280–88; 2 (1845): 365–84, 504–518, 599–613; and 3 (1846): 17–28, 311–319; Frederic Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1981), 83, 79. 58. C. Wilkins Eimi, “The Shot in the Eye,” Democratic Review 16 (1845): 147, 153. Poe praised the identical tale appearing in the American Review as “Jack Long” (1:121–36). 59. Kenneth Silverman, Edgar A.  Poe: Mournful and Never-Ending Remembrance (New York: HarperCollins, 1991). 60. Walter Benjamin, “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire,” Selected Writings, vol. 4, ed. Howard Eiland and Michael Jennings (Cambridge: Belknap Press, 2003), 335. 61. Walter Benjamin, “The Paris of the Second Empire in Baudelaire,” Selected Writings 4:40. Subsequent citations will be given parenthetically in the text. 62. Review of Longfellow’s The Waif, New York Weekly Mirror, January 25, 1845, Edgar Allan Poe: Essays and Reviews, ed. G.  R. Thompson (New York: Library of America, 1984), 702. Subsequent citations from this volume, designated ER, will be given parenthetically in the text. 63. Andrew Horn, “Poe and the Tory Tradition: The Fear of Jacquerie in ‘A Tale of the Ragged Mountains,”’ ESQ 29 (1983): 25–30; Michael J.  S. Williams, “Poe’s Ugly American: ‘A Tale of the Ragged Mountains,’” Poe Studies 34 (2001): 51–61. 64. Christina Zwarg, “Vigorous Currents, Painful Archives: The Production of Affect and History in Poe’s ‘Tale of the Ragged Mountains,’” Poe Studies 43 (2010): 27. 65. Boyd Carter, “Poe’s Debt to Charles Brockden Brown,” Prairie Schooner 27 (1953): 190–96; Charles Brockden Brown, Edgar Huntly, or, Memoirs of a Sleep-Walker, ed. Sydney Krause (Kent: Kent State University Press, 1984), 104. 66. “The Domain of Arnheim,” Tales and Sketches, ed. Patrick Quinn (New York: Library of America, 1984), 866. Subsequent citations will appear parenthetically in the text.

CHAPTER 5

The Sublime Object of Freedom

Everybody knew what she was called, but nobody anywhere knew her name. Disremembered and unaccounted for, she cannot be lost because no one is looking for her, and even if they were, how can they call her if they don’t know her name? Although she has a claim, she is not claimed. —Toni Morrison, Beloved

Like an unruly ghost, violence haunts the slave narrative. It dominates the polemical case against slavery. It shapes and severs families, ruins bodies, and renders language itself inarticulate. The experience of social death makes it impossible for writers to suppress their own annihilation, that sense, as Morrison puts it, of a “thickness thinning, dissolving into nothing” (123). The unstated premise of slave narratives is that so much must remain unsaid. In this chapter I will argue that such deep reserves of silence make ex-­ slave narrators exemplary. Slaves’ experience with trauma, and with the objectification that their legal status conferred, positioned them at the very center of the dialectical chess game that Poe and Benjamin sought to master. Inhabiting a legal realm somewhere between humanity and objects, slaves embodied the experiential dialectic in Benjamin’s political Toni Morrison, Beloved (New York: Knopf, 1987), 274. Subsequent citations will appear parenthetically in the text. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 J. Fichtelberg, Exceptional Violence and the Crisis of Classic American Literature, American Literature Readings in the 21st Century, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-07845-3_5

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phenomenology. They realized the most severe claims of reification: that the practices of capitalism destroyed independence and assailed reflection itself. Reification, as Benjamin recognized while completing The Origin of German Tragic Drama, turned the individual into an object among objects, condemned to reenact the market’s erosion of all distinctions and boundaries. In Tragic Drama, Benjamin associated reification with allegory, and argued that this erosion, or elision of differences, suborned sovereignty through general equivalence. If everything was equivalent to everything else, there were no sovereigns, no subjects, no masters or slaves. Like Baroque kings incapable of decision in states of exception, the reified subject, acutely sensitive to its compromised status, can imagine no stance or attitude free of these mind-forged manacles. Benjamin’s political phenomenology attempted to provide a liberating key, yet, at least initially, he also sought to privilege the sovereignty of critical thought. Ex-slave narrators knew better. Their response, unlike that of their masters, was not to seek a more powerful or retrograde sovereignty but to insist on the shared significance of trauma. It was in the collapse of distinctions and of expression that these writers forged their most potent claims. Their reticence marked the inner history of the empty place, and of the regime that had emerged in its name. This submerged silence is a symptom of what Paul Gilroy calls modernity’s inaugural terror. Rereading Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, Gilroy argues that the master-slave dialectic, source of Western rationality, is a blueprint for the philosophical discourse of modernity—a discourse in which the slave simultaneously figures as subject and object. As subject, Gilroy claims, the slave is inherently more powerful than the master. Far from fearing death, as in Hegel’s paradigm, the slave embraces it, recognizes death as the secret source of the master’s dominance. As such, it is the slave who embodies the “principle of negativity” at the heart of both the dialectic and the rational calculation that drives it.1 Yet this intimacy with death comes at a cost, since the experience of terror palsies the ability to convey it and forces survivors to seek a release in forms beyond the normative reach of discourse—in music, in performance, in jubilee, in apocalypse. For Gilroy, the “politics of transfiguration” is marked by “unsayable claims to truth,” by “wilfully damaged signs … struggling … to repeat the unrepeatable, to present the unpresentable” (37–38), to express the incommunicable essence of social death. African American art, Gilroy claims, is marked by a “sublime” engagement with history as

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devastating as that of the Holocaust. “Art’s Utopia,” he concludes, citing Adorno, “is draped in black” (38). Gilroy’s emphasis on death and silence, like Morrison’s meditation on a claim that cannot be claimed, suggests the deep associations between slave narratives and trauma. As a response to violence, accounts of trauma suggest defensive wounds. The inaugural violence has a shattering effect, fragmenting the narrative and displacing its terror. Hence the slave narrator’s encounter with death is marked by ineluctable gaps—the identity of fathers, the fate of family members, episodes of inexplicable cruelty, hearsay about neighbors and their illicit liaisons and desires—all the impenetrable static of a system that trades on noxious secrets. Yet the very opacity of the slave experience, the “veil” so powerfully evoked by W. E. B. Du Bois, has generated a counter-narrative, a working through of trauma insisting, like the Hegelian dialectic, on mastery and freedom through the creative pressure of the text itself. The slave narrative, that is to say, is often seen as marking what Houston Baker calls an ontological leap into self-­ consciousness through the appropriation of language and the penetration of discourse.2 It is the ex-slave narrator’s unique ability to recognize terror and to turn that recognition into social power that gives these texts cultural resonance. Slave narratives bear witness to the fissures and fragments that trace a broken path to authority. That, at least, is the claim in most critical accounts of slave narratives, Gilroy’s included. The victim, through Hegelian sublation, becomes privileged witness, endowed through a process of recognition that it is the critic’s task to decode and conclude. However, as Morrison’s troubled coda to Beloved attests, there remains a stubborn irreducibility to terror immune to representation, a heart of darkness that, far from resisting form, is the very form of form, the absence shaping self-presence. Most studies of slave narratives have neglected this constituting absence, which points away from triumphal accounts of empowerment or subversion to a realm that Gilroy terms “ethical” (36), a region beyond dominance and submission. The ground of that ethical relation, the domain of language and experience conceived through its absence, is what Emmanuel Levinas, in Otherwise Than Being, calls “saying”—the conditions and relations subtending the “originary violence” of language itself.3 Slave narratives are shadowed by this ethical substrate, neither powerful nor powerless, which turns the empty place of political contest into a revelation of norms. Viewed in another way, the ex-slave narrator’s insistence on the unsayable

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shatters the plenum, the social matrix imagining rigorous order, and substitutes a field of ever shifting and violated capacities. Ironically, trauma becomes the new figure of an authority that disintegrates at every turn. * * * Although, thanks to Morrison, trauma has increasingly figured in discussions of African American novels, surprisingly little has been done to apply the discourse explicitly to slave narratives.4 Yet if the problem of African American modernity is the problem of unsayable truths, then a closer reading of trauma is essential to that analysis. As Ruth Leys notes, the assessment of trauma is sharply divided over the issue of representation, with studies centering on combat veterans arguing that painful experiences are preserved in literal, if fragmentary, memories entering consciousness through flashbacks, and Holocaust studies arguing that trauma is the face of horror itself, a “black hole,” as Dori Laub puts it, from which no recollection emerges.5 To the former perspective belongs the concern with repetition, the mind’s obsessive replay of shattering experience in an attempt to gain mastery. To the latter perspective belongs the emphasis on representation, as the shadows of terror struggle toward consciousness. Cathy Caruth captures both perspectives in a reading of Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure Principle. The terror of trauma, she argues, arises from its belatedness, the delayed recognition of peril. “The shock of the mind’s relation to the threat of death,” Caruth observes, “is … precisely the missing of this experience … that, paradoxically, becomes the basis of the repetition.”6 A gap thus appears between the Hegelian confrontation with death conveyed by Gilroy, in which the encounter reveals the sufferer’s chastened, if resilient will, and the suppressive effects of trauma, which put the will itself in question. These tensions, I will argue, must figure in any application of trauma to slave narratives. One difficulty in applying trauma to these texts entails what Caruth calls belatedness, a term derived from Freud’s concept of Nachträglichkeit, or “delayed awareness.”7 The concept, which evolved throughout Freud’s career, originally referred to the delayed, if distorted, rendering of an early sexual experience through hysterical or neurotic symptoms. When Freud abandoned the seduction theory of neurosis, he adapted Nachträglichkeit to wider ends, including, in Moses and Monotheism, a sweeping appraisal of the influence of a putative primal murder on the constitution of Judaism. Still more boldly, in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Freud returned to the

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problem of traumatic repetition by arguing for a death drive in constant tension with life-preserving impulses—a tension that, much like the play of assertive and repressive forces in the unconscious, produced the disposition and poise of the organism. But despite the fact that Freud’s late work on trauma has had little clinical influence, the course of his thought on Nachträglichkeit—particularly the temporal course of his thought—is deeply suggestive for slave narratives. In pulling back from the seduction theory and seeking a wider basis for belatedness, Freud increasingly ignored the effects of lived or historical time until, in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, the timeliness of trauma had dissolved into transhistorical drives, “a state of things which had never yet been attained.” As the work of Elaine Scarry suggests, the slave’s foundational sense of annihilation, the nothingness framing language and torment, cannot be redeemed or transcended in time or through language alone.8 Impenetrable and obliterating, the world-destroying experience of violence approximates the “blankness” (Journey 29) that Houston Baker associates with plantation life: a numbing eclipse of integrity. Unlike Hegel’s narrative of dialectical progress, the slave’s actual position, from Scarry’s perspective, is one of relentless erasure. How, then, is the slave narrative possible? If the essence of life writing, even subaltern life writing, is to convey the truth of one’s experience through an imposition of form, how can the formerly enslaved express the essence of non-being, of formlessness? Here, it is useful to recall Kant’s subtle reference to trauma in Critique of the Power of Judgment in his discussion of the dynamic sublime, if only to countermand it. Certain experiences of immensity are so daunting to the imagination, Kant contends, that to perceive them is to “sacrifice” (aufopferen/ aufopfert) one’s apprehension in the service of a higher power.9 The very defeat of the perceptive powers, the inability to name or represent experience, brings a redemptive surge as the subject recognizes the mind’s range and resilience, even in the face of incomprehension—a recognition conferring renewed authority. The confrontation with terror—the threat of annihilation—paradoxically preserves the mind from incapacity. Terror elevates consciousness. Kant’s solution, though, is neither dialectical nor determinative. The sublime encounter occurs in suspended time, each experience separated from its predecessor, and it assumes a sheltered consciousness insulated from material assault. For Kant, the encounter with the sublime, like the broader Copernican revolution he espoused, is affirmative of the mind’s cloistered sovereignty.

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But what if the observer’s security, as in Benjamin’s chess game, were destroyed, the essential complacency shattered? Suppose the experience of the sublime were not a perverse form of pleasure but a formula for recurrent pain? How could the experience of aesthetic perception be applied to the trials of the slave? To imagine terror as an empty place, the core of consciousness in a state of exception where law is suspended, is to assert that the act of perception itself, however fleeting or fragile, is a source of tactical authority in a particular historical milieu, and a model for the reflective critic attempting to transcend structural violence. In “Some Motifs in Baudelaire,” Benjamin argued that, for the traumatophile, the shocks of modernity were not atemporal, but dialectical, as lived experience met and disordered the deep structures of consciousness challenged by emergency, displacement, and revolution. In Freud’s reading, potentially any experience can be traumatic, and the mind acts as a powerful filter to preserve equanimity. Yet Benjamin also maintains that consciousness itself is damaged by the encounter, eroded or “frayed” (SW 4:318) by the constant assault, and, in emergencies, overwhelmed. Consciousness thus bears the scars of its historical encounters. For the slave, the experience of terror similarly disorders meaning. Much like the sublime encounter with the monstrous or magnified in nature, the slave’s experience of violence hinges on a failed attempt to assign motive and purpose to the master’s vicious sovereignty—a disciplinary excess that seems to embody unreason. The thing-like slave, at once object and subject in a murderous economy, shatters the lawful and purposive disposition of nature and history, and, through exception, stands apart from the plenum in a perverse rendition of mastery. This apprehension of trauma, permitting no return to the normative affirmation of security and order, is nevertheless not without resources. It is to this moment, as Benjamin realized, that may be justly ascribed the existential power of critique. In both differing from and deferring to violence, the slave recognizes the savage structure of the world. That moment of fleeting insight incurred at the height of torment, it must be noted, is prelinguistic: it cannot be conveyed through language. As Elaine Scarry has argued, the experience of extreme violence destroys language, induces a verbal catastrophe that mirrors the “crisis of world collapse” precipitated by torture. “The objects of consciousness,” she writes, “from the most expansive to the most intimate … all in one patient rush are swept through and annihilated.”10 This response appears to mimic Primo Levi’s “gray … zone,” a domain, emerging from the Nazi death camps, without will or meaning. But Scarry’s observation must be

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carefully qualified. As Ñacuñán Sáez argues, the apparent dissolution of language under torture, its replacement by primal screams, may seem to imply a regression to an infantile state akin to “the mentality of archaic societies.” The collapse of civility, from this standpoint, suggests a return to “primitivism.” But even responses under torture have intention and “syntax,” Sáez maintains, a mirroring of the aggressor’s prescriptions that suggests not meaningfulness but the “absen[ce]” of meaning, a rupture in reason.11 In a regime where slaves figure as primitives, one would similarly want to locate a response that does not simply replicate debasement but insists on absence—a gap in representation that would indicate the traumatic condition not of the individual, but of the dominant order. Any confrontation that merely reproduced the logic of that order—whether through seeking dominance, recognition, or principled reversal—would, under the most violent circumstances, merely reinscribe the captive status of the victim. Undermining power through trickery, mimicry, or signification reaffirms the methods and aims of power. To emerge from bondage, the subaltern cannot merely recover speech. Few critical appraisals of the passage from annihilation to sacrifice— from the “dispossession” experienced by an “empty vessel,” as Saidiya Hartman puts it,12 to the status of an individual who recognizes her role in a world system built on stolen labor—are fully able to account for that change without echoing the very logic they oppose. In the most influential accounts, the burst into critical and aesthetic self-awareness is explained through the effects of some pre-existent sign system reclaiming traumatic experience. According to Henry Louis Gates, Jr., slaves drew on an oral tradition that allowed them to undermine the dominant discourse, much as Frederick Douglass exposed the “arbitrary” dictates of slavery by “destroy[ing]” its “symbolic code.”13 Similarly, Daphne Brooks argues that African American artists, shaped by “the horrific historical memory of moving through oceanic space,” converted traumatic “self-­fragmentation” into cultural authority through “dissonantly enlightened performance.” Such “Afro-alienation acts” signify on the dominant order by expressing the radical revision imposed through the “powerful stillness” of the outsider, a performance that spontaneously generates critique.14 Performance also figures in the work of Jeannine DeLombard, who argues that writers like Douglass strove to move from frightened witness to commanding voice, leaving behind the brutalized bodies of slavery for the “juridical rhetoric” of the survivor.15 Perhaps most inventive is Hartman’s argument that the traumatic experience of nothingness incites a “space of … revision

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and repetition” revealing the “subterranean history of rupture” (76). The juba, Hartman contends, through its syncopated slapping and stamping, replays the history of violence in a different key, one that exhibits “rememory.” The repetitive nature of these communal performances betrays “the inadequacy of redress and the regularity of domination and terror” even as it fosters the recognition of the self (76). In these accounts, language is always already present, either in the resources of oral tradition or in the ordered innovation of performance. Representation, as an array of expressive strategies, is the irreducible structure of the slave’s own critical response. Such responses, in turn, reflect a profound Hegelian influence. Hegel’s account of lordship and bondage presupposes physical and metaphysical face-offs. As Judith Butler has argued in her reading of the Phenomenology, the initial encounter between a self-possessed consciousness and an other, the moment of recognition, is framed by necessity, anger, and despair, since being-for-itself must acknowledge a dependence on another that robs consciousness of its desire for absolute sovereignty. The contradiction between necessity and desire triggers in consciousness a murderous rage— the need, as Butler puts it, to “annihilate” the other—and precipitates the deathlike struggle resulting in bondage.16 But the presence of the master, whose demands structure the world in what I have been calling the plenum, allows the slave to regain self-presence through labor—that is, by turning the improved object into a testament of “individuality,” thereby recognizing it as a metaphor for his or her own status.17 Transforming the thing, the slave transforms the self. Arguments for the liberating effects of signifying or performance extend the domain of working on—and through—things to the field of language, where the relentless objectification and diminution of slaves provide the material for a transformation of meaning that simultaneously reverses trauma. The repetition of corrupt signs turns social death into social recognition. But although there can be no testimonies of slave life without representation, all speech acts are not created equal. Consider this meditation on blackness by Jamaica Kincaid: The blackness is not my blood, though it flows through my veins. The blackness enters my many-tiered spaces and soon the significant word and event recede and eventually vanish: in this way I am annihilated and my form becomes formless and I am absorbed into a vastness of free-flowing matter. In the blackness, then, I have been erased. I can no longer say my own

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name. I can no longer point to myself and say “I.” In the blackness my voice is silent. First, then, I have been my individual self, carefully banishing randomness from my existence, then I am swallowed up in the blackness so that I am one with it.18

While Kincaid artfully conveys an embryonic formlessness, the oceanic feeling that Freud associates with life’s most primitive experiences, this passage is not merely a retreat to the childlike state criticized by Sáez. Rather, Kincaid attempts to capture the sensation of absence, an array of relations that cannot be conveyed through the binary oppositions of language. In this altered disposition, there are no subjects or objects, no names or voices, order or work, but only undifferentiated matter. The very attempt to express such a state is, of course, self-defeating, but the ruptures that the attempt imposes on language—the effort to understand what the phrase “I have been erased” might possibly mean—suggest an ambiguous association of annihilation and presence grounding an elusive representation of blackness. To be black, Kincaid seems to be saying, is to be within and beyond the means of language itself. Something like this elusiveness may be glimpsed in a rare account of a speech by Lewis Clarke delivered in Brooklyn, New York, in 1842. Clarke, who fled Kentucky for Canada and returned to retrieve his younger brother from slavery, was recounting his life before a receptive abolitionist audience chaired by Lewis Tappan and recorded by the editor of the National Anti-Slavery Standard at the time, Lydia Maria Child. It was Child who, more than a decade later, would bring to life the recollections of Harriet Jacobs, claiming that she had not “added any thing to the incidents, or changed the import of her very pertinent remarks.”19 With Clarke, despite her patronizing tone, Child captures a quality in the speaker less evident in the formal transcripts of speeches delivered by Frederick Douglass, James McCune Smith, and others regularly reprinted in abolitionist newspapers. “I have seldom been more entertained,” she writes; “the uncouth awkwardness of his language had a sort of charm, like the circuitous expression, and stammering utterance, of a foreign tongue, striving to speak our most familiar phrases.”20 But Clarke was far from inarticulate: he was a showman, with a keen sense of how to win and hold an audience. When he offers an apology for his faint grasp of grammar, a “friendly voice” responds, “Your words are plenty good enough … go on—never mind the words” (152). Doubtless, the audience was stimulated by Clarke’s aura of expertise. He testified to the insidious effects of

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slavery, detecting the dangerous pride of the master who claims, “You’re a man, but you’re mine. You’re as white as I am, but you’re mine” (155). He also sensed how to titillate. Telling a story of a widower who discovered that his female slaves were mocking him for taking a slave mistress, Clarke paused when he heard “ill-mannered and gross laughter” (156). “Perhaps I had better not try to tell this story,” he responded, “for I cannot tell it as it was” (156). The master’s revenge, he finally disclosed, was a mixture of harsh justice and sadism—a sharp increase in the workload of the offending women and a severe flogging of their naked bodies. Clarke’s mixture of coy resistance and pornographic detail doubtless sharpened his appeal. But that resistance also hinted at a deeper reserve, an inability to convey the true nature of his experience. It was not just that Clarke lacked words; it was that language itself often failed to express what he really meant. Affirming, for example, that all slaves are forced to lie, he tells a story of a friend, “black as the inside of a blacking box” (154), who was trusted above all other men in Kentucky. “I thought you observed, a little while ago, that slaves couldn’t be honest” (154), one skeptic called out. “So I did; and it was true,” Clarke responded. “But this man, you see, was a slave, and then again he warn’t a slave” (154)—an ambiguous status that might have been applied to Clarke himself. What, then, was a lie? Of another, all-white slave he remarks, “I might tell you his name, and where he lived. I believe I will. No, I won’t either” (155). Here the contradiction of “whiteness” and “slavery” creates a verbal impasse, a constriction of language itself. “I’ve got it in here,” Clarke claims as he begins his talk, “but I don’t know how to get it out” (151). Clarke’s use of apophasis— the rhetorical trope that stimulates interest by claiming ignorance or insufficiency—is not merely a come-on. It is an evocation of the profoundly disordered condition of a slave world that defies normal expression. His experience, he seems to be saying, cannot be easily represented. It may have been with this stubborn intransigence in mind that Child acknowledged the challenge in conveying his thought. “His discourse,” she asserted, “had no thread, but was as discursive and uncertain as the movements of fallen leaves in the autumn wind” (159). For Clarke, we may imagine, this submerged or disorderly discourse was neither strategic nor random, but the expression of a gray zone conveying the emergence and dissolution of meaning. From the perspective of the Kantian sublime, it was an aesthetic rendering of blackness.

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This sense of verbal impasse, widely reflected in narratives written by ex-slaves themselves, has one source in what Hartman calls “fungibility” (21)—the equivalence of merchandise in a market economy. A nineteenth-­ century definition of the term specifies that “a thing … is said to be fungible … [if] the delivery of any object which answers to the generic description will satisfy … the obligation” (OED). For chattel slaves, fungibility generated an existential cleavage—the erasure of will and significance vying with an attempt to make meaning and perceive purpose in the world, often expressed through traumatic repetition. Hence, there is an unmistakable discursiveness in the narratives of the most compulsive fugitives. William Wells Brown, for example, recounts a childhood almost completely governed by accident and exchange. Although owned by Dr. John Young in Kentucky, he is hired out no less than seven times, enduring while still quite young a succession of often arbitrary and violent masters. Most frightening is his service to the “soul-driver” Walker, whose despicable trade starkly reinforces Brown’s own status. “When I learned the fact of my having been hired to a negro speculator,” he confesses, “no one can tell my emotions … I am at a loss for language to express my feelings.”21 Rational discourse fails to capture this erasure of being. Not long after, Brown tries to escape, is retaken and jailed, then sold three more times before he leaves. His repeated experience of nullity forced him to flee for his life. Even more disorienting is the early life of Israel Campbell, who endured eleven masters before the first of several escape attempts. Campbell’s aleatory path was complicated by his original owner’s death and bankruptcy, which led to four changes of ownership before he was thirteen years old. Campbell captures the existential terror of this uncertainty in a haunting vignette. When an enslaved woman heard that her husband had been sold and would be transported to the deep South, the news “unstrung her mind, and she cut her throat with a razor.” So great was the young Campbell’s “terror” over this incident “that I believe I should have rather died than that such should have been my fate.”22 Here, Campbell expresses horror in a telling ambiguity: “such” a fate may well include the sale, the shock of separation, or the suicide itself—as if social death would preempt self-murder. Campbell’s lament at yet another change of masters conveys the haunting effects of fungibility: “Again my ever-changing life must be doomed to pass the bitter ordeal of cruel indifference” (40). A mere vessel for his owners’ intentions and desires, he experiences the terrors of what Benjamin called mythic law.

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The slaves’ fungibility suggests a phenomenology of violence pervading not only the “chattel principle”—which James Pennington calls “[t]he being of slavery, its soul and body”23—but also the distorted object relations imposed on the slave. Violence marks the rupture of those relations, as it provides the grammar of everyday life. When masters sought to undermine or destroy slaves’ security, for example, they did so by dramatically underscoring slaves’ commodity status. John Thompson reports that when one slaveowner faced sudden bankruptcy, he sent his sixty slaves to a tobacco warehouse, where they went about their tasks until “the warehouse door was suddenly closed” and all were chained and sold.24 Like the tobacco they processed, the workers found themselves part of the shipment. Escaping slaves, in the gray zone between object and self-­possession, also sensed that preserving life meant a confusion with things. During Henry Bibb’s first, unsuccessful, flight from his owners, “shunning my fellow men, as if they were wild ferocious beasts,” he took refuge in a woodpile, where he remained motionless all day.25 Pennington’s harrowing escape led him to hide for hours amid corn fodder (33). “I cannot now, with pen or tongue, give a correct idea of the feeling of wretchedness I experienced,” he remarks. Literally shaking with fear, he was powerless to move (35). These nightmare scenarios often haunt escapees long after they have found freedom. Harriet Jacobs recalls her two-day ordeal in “Snaky Swamp,” where she hid before taking refuge in her grandmother’s shed. The constant assault of mosquitoes from above and the writhing of snakes underfoot, from which she could neither run nor hide, made the experience the embodiment of “terror” (112, 113). Similarly, when Bibb and his family hid from pursuers in Louisiana, they were surrounded by “a gang of blood-thirsty wolves” (124). Frozen, even at the time of writing, by fear, “I find myself entirely unable to describe what my own feelings were at that time” (126). Here, venomous predators immobilize the narrator, whose loss of language underscores his abjection. Pinned down by dread, he has become the desperate object of a murderous rampage. With numbing regularity, the discipline slaves endured reinforced their status as objects. William Wells Brown, for example, echoing the predicament of Thompson’s tobacco warehouse, recounts a punishment that one master called “Virginia play,” involving the suspension and near suffocation of a slave with the smoke from burning tobacco stems, as if he were being cured (21–22). Flogging was often preceded by associating bodies with fixed objects—tying them to barrels, suspending from joists, or securing to stakes in the ground. Peter Bruner was “bucked,” or hogtied to a

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stick, leaving him “entirely helpless without any use whatever of myself,” then severely flogged.26 Escapees could count on having their legs chained to logs. Bibb reports being retaken after one escape attempt and tethered, hand and foot, to a horse. “My hands were fastened together with heavy irons,” and his master “tied my feet together under the horse” (89). When, in the city, the horse takes fright, Bibb is pitched back, not only powerless to avoid injury or direct the animal, but essentially one with it. Punishments with everyday objects—a frequent method of torture, as Scarry observes (40–41)—reinforced the slaves’ defenselessness. Leonard Black recalls that his master once struck him in the mouth with “an iron-­ toothed rake,” knocking out a tooth in an exchange of anatomy and implement.27 John Thompson, recounting his mother’s trials as a plantation cook, writes that she was beaten “with shovel, tongs, or whatever other weapon lay within … reach.” “My feelings, upon hearing her shrieks and pleadings,” Thompson remarks, “may better be imagined than described” (49). Language, like self-reflection, is suspended in these assaults on the victim’s resistance and will. Although words often failed to convey the dread experienced in this “dissolving into nothing,” some writers attempted to express the sensation through disconcerting metaphor. Critics have often noted William Grimes’s bitter remark that he bequeaths his whip-scarred skin as a parchment for the Constitution,28 yet he was equally trenchant in comparing a slave’s slashed back to “a field lately ploughed” (43)—saturating agriculture in blood. Israel Campbell also captures the equivalence of labor and savagery by exposing the vicious economy of a cotton plantation where any deficit in a slave’s daily task was made up in pain—“as many lashes as my task was wanting pounds” (34). Perhaps the most searching instance of such metaphors appears in Pennington’s The Fugitive Blacksmith. Recalling his own entry into the blood-stained gate of slavery, Pennington describes a cruel overseer who kept a stock of hickory switches “in order that he might not at any time be without one” (3). Coming across one of these weapons in the yard, “I picked it up, and boy-like, was using it for a horse,” when the overseer appeared and “fell upon me with the one he then had in hand, and flogged me most cruelly” (3). Here Pennington reveals a double dispossession, an attack upon the imagination that transforms a harmless object into a vicious tool. The incident also reveals a perverse economic exchange, the conversion of creativity into cruelty. Through such moments, endlessly repeated, slaves came to understand their fungibility as an instrument of social death. Nowhere was the

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perverse logic of that equation more evident than on those rare occasions when slaves took advantage of it. Jacob Green recalls how he evaded a whipping by duping a fellow slave to take an order for Green’s punishment to the overseer, who knocked the victim down and delivered thirty-­ nine lashes.29 The more notorious instance of this trickery involves William Wells Brown, who paid an illiterate passerby a dollar to take a note to the Vicksburg jail, there to redeem a trunk. Instead he “received twenty lashes on his bare back, with the negro-whip” (56). The violent transfer of meaning conveyed through metaphors by Grimes, Campbell, and others is made palpable in this savage equivalence of bodies. An economy of expression is reflected in an economy of pain. Ex-slave narrators did not merely act as recording secretaries of violence, however. With considerable sophistication and subtlety, they sought to capture the elusive motives and pressures governing the regime of the socially dead. In what amounts to a collective meditation on cruelty, they exposed both the psychology and the structural effects of the masters’ aggression. At base, as Marcus Wood observes, the abuse of slaves was a form of sexual surrogacy, the exploitation of black bodies to express the slaveholders’ insatiable desires.30 Almost all narratives include at least one instance in which a master, consumed by passion, murders the victim. Campbell tells the story of a man named Jupiter who maligned his master’s wife, calling her a “red-headed devil” (67). His owner, infuriated by a verbal attack that he undoubtedly likened to a sexual assault, tied down his victim and gave him a series of vicious beatings that ultimately cost him his life. The attack on Jupiter’s bared body staked to the ground amounts to a homoerotic appropriation in which the master possesses and violates the slave.31 Even more disturbing is Campbell’s account of his own master’s assault on a runaway slave named Caleb. Laying him across a barrel and securing his hands and legs to a fence rail, Garner “lost his temper,” not only “giving him two hundred lashes” but also punctuating the assault by “draw[ing a] saw across his bare back” (59). Here, too, Campbell seems to recognize how the assailant crossed the line between savage discipline and desire, as both whip and sawtooth penetrated prone flesh. But the torture of slaves is not only an expression of illicit desire; it is also a revelation of the commodity fetish. In his discussion of John Steadman’s Narrative of a Five Years’ Expedition Against the Revolted Negroes of Surinam, Wood examines a parallel instance of the death of Neptune, who was staked and vivisected yet continued, according to Steadman, to mock onlookers by offering to auction his body parts for their consumption. In

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doing so, Wood argues, Neptune delivers a grotesquely self-possessed parody of the relationship between profit, possession, and desire (106–107). Similarly, William Grimes recalls an episode in which an overseer, “in a great rage” (46–47), attempted to whip him. “When I was tied, … I spoke out brave, and said … why don’t you get some better ones; whip me till your soul is satisfied, but I’ll remember every stick” (23). Grimes suggests that the punishment was linked to the overseer’s fear of being exposed for trading in stolen goods procured by other slaves. By whipping Grimes, he is, in part, projecting the vain illusion that he is disciplining, rather than appropriating, the plantation’s fungible economy of bodies, goods, and pain. While Wood insists on the literal significance of Marx’s commodity fetish, American ex-slave narrators are more often concerned with the affective economy of violence, its disciplinary excess. If social death, the relentless convertibility of objects and bodies, creates an expressive impasse or gap in language, one response is to assess the winners and losers in the transaction. In a compelling passage, Henry Bibb gives an indication of the strategy. Lamenting that he was worked “both late and early, by day and night,” without food, clothing, or adequate shelter, Bibb protests his laboring for a tyrant, through all kinds of weather, hot or cold, wet or dry, and without shoes frequently, until the month of December, with my bare feet on the cold frosty ground, cracked open and bleeding as I walked. Reader, believe me when I say that no tongue, nor pen ever has or can express the horrors of American Slavery. Consequently I despair in finding language to express adequately the deep feeling of my soul, as I contemplate the past history of my life. (15)

Here, apophasis is subtended by a series of almost symmetrical oppositions expressing the economic motives embodied in—and exacted upon—the flesh of the sufferer. The play of excess and lack provides an alternate means of assessing sadistic discipline—not as the bottomless expression of desire but as the fluctuation of need. In this passage, Bibb’s injured body functions less as a fetish than as a universal equivalent—Marx’s term for a currency that can symbolize and absorb all transactions. Occupying the position of money, the narrator distances himself or herself from the abject economy of pain; for while the slave’s body might still figure as the receptacle of violence, it also accords with the most abstract relations of the

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system itself. That is, the narrator embodies not only the principle of negation but also that of order, even as both principles circulate around a central and inexpressible violence. Slave narrators, in such passages, provide a measure for the economy that consumes them. The relation between the narrator’s anguish over expressing the moral costs of the system—as in Bibb’s remark that he despairs of finding adequate language—and the play of excess and lack often produces a striking rhetoric intended to highlight the writer’s engagement with violence. If traumatic experience was a kind of black hole, narrators attempted to capture its effects through the tropes of amplification and polysyndeton—the proliferation of language around a center of pain. John Thompson provides a chilling example in a description of his mother: Sometimes she wept and sobbed all night, but her tears must be dried and her sobs hushed, ere the overseer’s horn sounded, which it did at early dawn, lest they should betray her. And she, unrefreshed, must shake off her dull slumbers, and repair, at break of day, to the field, leaving her little ones to a similar, or perhaps, worse fate on the coming day, and dreading a renewal of her own sorrows the coming evening. (21)

Thompson’s description, both haunting and incremental, captures the cumulative pain experienced by slaves defined by the master’s needs. While he gestures to sentimental discourse, as in the suppressed sobs and tears and the abandoned children, the power of the passage resides in the elongated sentences with their insistent, hopeless rhythm capturing traumatic repetition. Amplification mirrors the mother’s function as a universal equivalent. Henry Bibb conveys a similar experience in his account of the sufferings endured by escapees: I prosecuted my journey vigorously for nearly forty-eight hours without food or rest, struggling against external difficulties such as no one can imagine who has never experienced the same: not knowing what moment I might be captured while travelling among strangers, through cold and fear, breasting the north winds, being thinly clad, pelted by the snow storms through the dark hours of the night, and not a house in which I could enter to shelter me from the storm. (52)

This passage, which echoes Frederick Douglass’s oratorical meditation on being a fugitive in New York,32 seeks, in its halting discursiveness, to capture a swelling anxiety alien to all but the sufferer. Noteworthy, in the

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passages by Thompson and Bibb, is the emphasis on psychological pain, an experience often mined by sentimental antislavery writers like Lydia Maria Child, Eliza Follen, and Harriet Beecher Stowe. But the effect could also be used to convey physical pain. Jacob Green, for example, describes the lynching of a slave who stabbed a white man to prevent a sexual assault. Here, the effect of amplification is achieved through the accumulation of chilling detail, as Green describes, with almost clinical detachment, the preparations for the execution: “A staple was driven into the stump of a tree, with a chain attached to it, and one of his handcuffs was taken off and brought through the chain, and then fastened on his hand again.” The 3000 people attending the spectacle—slave and free alike—provide a visual analogue of the master’s extrajudicial fury. “The unearthly sounds that came from the blazing pile, as poor Dan writhed in the agonies of death,” Green concludes, “it is beyond the power of my pen to describe” (20–21). Apophasis punctuates the boundless torment. Bibb captures the elusive relation between language and unlimited pain in a concise formula: “Man may picture the bands of the rocks and the rivers,/ The hills and the valleys, the lakes and the ocean,/ But the horrors of slavery, he never can trace” (18). Amplification projected the agonies of that numbing silence. Curiously, this pattern of traumatic amplification extended not only to episodes of punishment but also to narratives of resistance. Douglass’s apocalyptic account of his battle with Edward Covey, tempered by his modest description of grabbing his opponent’s throat by “the ends of [his] fingers” (71), has obscured how frequently such battles occurred, especially in books not published by the pacifist American Antislavery Society. In many instances, slaves openly and repeatedly fought with masters and overseers. When an overseer attempted to whip Israel Campbell in a dispute over a horse, the slave “seized him by the collar … gave him one or two blows in the short-ribs and made for the door” (55). In a scene reminiscent of Douglass’s struggle with Covey, the overseer calls for help from a bystander, but Campbell’s sharp threat prevents the intervention. Later, Campbell drew a bowie knife and “a double-barrelled pistol heavily loaded” (113) on another overseer, squaring off and crying, “Burst your low-lived head! Here’s death, right now!” (114). Campbell fled a counterattack, returning weeks later to discover his opponent still so frightened that the slave was forced to apologize. Similar incidents occur in the narratives of William Green, William Grimes, Peter Bruner, Isaac Mason, and John Thompson,33 who provides an extended account of choking his overseer with the handle of his own bullwhip and later wresting a large

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“tobacco stick” (45) from the overseer’s hands and beating him. Although Thompson is trussed and flogged for the offense, his master insists that the overseer stop after ten lashes and forbids further punishment without the master’s knowledge. In this instance, Thompson’s aggression not only won his master’s attention but also had the tangible benefit of increasing the allowance of food—the source of the initial contention. One might assume that such episodes confirm the relevance of Hegel’s master-slave dialectic. As in Douglass’s assertion that “however long I might remain a slave in form, the day had passed forever when I could be a slave in fact” (73), these acts of counterviolence might be read as the inaugural gestures of freedom, the defiant first step in a path that led to the writing of the narrative itself. However, in most texts recounting such episodes, the writer makes it clear that invigorating resistance fails to alter the conditions of social death—that defiance itself was one more element in a fungible economy. Both William Green (13) and Grimes (23) declare that they would rather die than continue to endure insult, yet the insults continue, and a rebellious slave Thompson knew flatly declares that if their master whips him one more time, “I will kill him and be hung at once!” (37). Isaac Mason wrenched a stick from a vindictive master and beat the man himself. His payoff: repeated beatings, an assault with a pitchfork, and a narrow escape from gunshots (26, 29). Grimes is particularly insistent on the larger pattern of suffering that defiance punctuates rather than alters. Not only did the combative narrator bear the marks of his struggle on his back, but his life in the North was also a litany of judicial assaults, as his property was seized, garnished, or stolen. Even years out of slavery, Grimes is outraged when his master threatens to return him to chains: It would have exhibited an awful spectacle of the conduct and insistency of men, to have done it; yet I was undoubtedly the lawful property of my master, according to the laws of the country, and though many would justify him, perhaps aid in taking me back, yet if there is any man in God’s whole creation, who will say, with respect to himself, (only bring the case home,) that there are any possible circumstances in which it is just that he should be at the capricious disposal of a fellow being, if he will say, that nature within him, that feeling, that reason tells him so, or can convince him so, that man lies! (80)

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Although the crisis results in Grimes’s freedom, the account, with its legalistic accretion of detail, suggests the crushing weight of authority preventing the fugitive’s security. It was doubtless that conviction that led to Grimes’s association of his scarred skin with the Constitution. From this bleak standpoint, one might suggest a structural, as well as an emotive, significance for the trope of apophasis so often noted in these texts. If slaves are the vessels for their masters’ libidinal and material drives, if even resistance invites ever more sustained responses of violence, then the narrative of violence itself becomes the ground of the writer’s most compelling interiority. By exploiting the opacity of pain, its resistance to observation and description, slave narratives appropriate the experience of social death, claim it as their own. One of the most curious features in depictions of violence by ex-slave writers is the modesty they display. Scenes of the sufferings of others, to be sure, are often marked by amplification, even though the description falls short of what Wood might call pornographic detail. Brown, for example, recounts a whipping of his mother that parallels Douglass’s account of his Aunt Hester: She cried, “Oh! pray—Oh! pray—Oh! pray”—these are generally the words of slaves, when imploring mercy at the hands of their oppressors. I heard her voice, and knew it, and jumped out of my bunk, and went to the door. Though the field was some distance from the house, I could hear every crack of the whip, and every groan and cry of my poor mother. I remained at the door, not daring to venture any further. (15–16)

Through repetition and polysyndeton, Brown manages to convey both the prolonged suffering of his mother and his own imaginative identification with her pain, all while maintaining a studied distance from the ordeal meant to shape and resemble the reader’s own response. In this regard, he recapitulates Adam Smith’s seminal analysis of sympathy in The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759). Although we can have no immediate access to another’s pain, Smith argues, our imaginative acts might “place ourselves in his situation … [and] enter as it were into his body.”34 Brown achieves this effect with admirable economy, allowing the crack of the whip and the mother’s cries to register through the boy’s anguished perception. Apophasis conveys a similar effect. When his “old grey-headed mother” is beaten, Thompson writes, “[m]y feelings, upon hearing her shrieks and pleadings, may better be imagined than described” (49). Forced to witness his master “shamefully scourg[e] and abus[e]” his wife, Malinda,

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Bibb writes, “I despair in finding decent language to describe the bloody act of cruelty” (43). Like Lewis Clarke’s reticence, these formulations invite access even as they deny entry. They create a kind of slave sublime, a scene of subjection conveying not the reader’s appropriation of pain but the distance between observer and victim. Terror both marks these women and puts them out of reach. If reticence is a tool for identification in the ordeals of others, the slave narrators’ accounts of their own suffering often have a markedly different effect. Although occasionally one encounters attempts to render pain in the same evocative language, more often the writers provide almost clinical accounts—objective assessments rather than scenes of subjection. Relatively few scenes depict the narrator as the praying and screaming victim of an assault. Israel Campbell does admit that he “hollowed and screamed” (31) when his master beat him for running away, although he implies that his severe treatment led to better conditions on the farm. Jacob Green gives a visceral sense of his suffering by describing wounds incurred from a beating that would “break and run” in the “hot sun,” so that his shirt could be removed only by taking “with it much of my flesh, leaving my back perfectly raw” (10). But arresting as these images appear, they are outnumbered by passages conveying relative detachment. Departing from the heavy investment in graphic and provocative detail purveyed in texts like Theodore Weld’s American Slavery As It Is (1839), these accounts read more like police reports than indictments. Brown recalls an episode of Virginia play by recording that he was “well smoked” and set to “coughing and sneezing” (22). John Andrew Jackson simply states, “I was tied up and received fifty lashes. … I was beaten on the average, at least every week.”35 James Smith relies on physical, rather than emotional detail to render a childhood whipping during which “The sharp twang of the rawhide, as it struck my shoulders, raised me from the floor.”36 Jacob Stroyer received “a first class flogging” in a stable,37 and Peter Bruner was repeatedly cowhided for running away, “which did not feel extra good” (39). The most arresting instance of detachment appears in Moses Roper’s Narrative, where he describes a cotton press used as an instrument of torture, accompanied by a detailed diagram: By it he hung me up by the hands at letter a, a horse, and at times, a man moving round the screw e, and carrying it up and down, and pressing the block c into a box d, into which the cotton is put. At this time he hung me up for a quarter of an hour. I was carried up ten feet from the ground, when

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Mr. Gooch asked me if I was tired? He then let me rest for five minutes, then carried me round again, after which, he let me down and put me into the box d, and shut me down in it for about ten minutes.38

Such accounts, like Weld’s more pronounced scenes of subjection, are meant to enhance the credibility of an experience too outrageous to be believed. Yet, in contrast to narrators’ vivid depictions of the sufferings of others, there is a determined silence in these scenes, an insistence on the privacy of pain. If the writer claims, as Roper does, that the “marks” of suffering “at present remain on my body” (12), these signs only underscore the ownership of an experience that no reader or onlooker can possess. Elizabeth Keckley captures this attitude in an account of a severe whipping. Although she alludes to her “quivering flesh” under the lash, the trickling blood, and the “excruciating agony of those moments,” she insists, “I closed my lips firmly, that not even a groan might escape from them, and I stood like a statue.”39 As she is reduced to an object, the silence of her suffering bestows a social power. This claim about the privacy of pain must be carefully qualified, lest it seem to echo the racist assumptions of many antebellum readers. If slaves were defined, as Walter Johnson writes, “beyond the skin of … subjects, into the very fabric of their form,”40 then narrators’ appropriation of suffering would appear to confirm their annihilation. By owning their pain, they are disowning themselves. This apparent complicity has contributed to a scholarly debate, now more than a century old, over the character of slaves, one that, more recently, can be tied to Stanley Elkins’s disturbing assertion, in Slavery (1959), that the domination of slaves produced Sambo-like dependents incapable of subversion or protest, a people thoroughly reduced by violence. The counterattack to Elkins’s Cold War pessimism was led by John Blassingame, whose seminal The Slave Community (1972) demonstrated that, far from a concentration camp, the plantation was “a battlefield where slaves fought masters … to preserve their manhood” [sic].41 The resources of mutual care, petty theft, illicit travel, religious fervor, and frequent sabotage, Blassingame argued—what may be called the counter-structure to slavery’s plenary authority—turned a subject people into a powerful force. This cultural reading, pursued over a wide field embracing African inheritances, family gardens, folk celebrations, dances, prayer meetings, harbored runaways, and outright rebellions, has vastly enhanced our understanding of slaves’ lives,42 although it has not quite reversed Elkins’s shrewd observation, in an afterword to the

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third edition of Slavery, that scholarship in the field amounts to a two-way street allowing traffic in both “damage” and “resistance.”43 Walter Johnson has recently offered a different metaphor involving the commingling rather than the separation of traffic. Critiquing the trope of agency motivating many of the community studies, he argues that “agency and resistance were themselves structured by power and exploitation” (River 214),44 that the two forces were locked in mutually determining concert and contest occasioned by a system of complex and closed exchanges—less a street than an endless loop. From this standpoint there are no victims or victors, no moments of definitive Hegelian growth or overcoming, but rather an interminable, ultimately tragic play of violence and deprivation for master and slave alike. “[T]he terms of … resistance,” Johnson asserts, “reflec[t] the terms of … oppression” (River 214). Like Johnson, I am arguing not that violence defined the nature of the enslaved, but that the lived experience of violence governed the victim’s response. The portrayal of suffering through apophasis—through a gap or absence of meaning—was at once a register of anguish and an assertion of resolve. The depiction of torment situated ex-slave narrators in an overdetermined cultural field containing literary scenes of subjection, minstrel show caricatures, newspaper libels, antislavery melodramas, and Southern romances—all of which conveyed a massive structural violence. In rendering pain, narrators were thus simultaneously invoking and resisting the accumulated imagery influencing even the most sympathetic readers. Their texts, to cite Johnson, are “at once thoroughly determined and insistently transcendent.”45 One sees this keenly in Roper’s account of his torture, in which his suffering is eclipsed by an object—conveying the substance of annihilation—yet in which his own interior experience is rigorously guarded, walled off from the accumulation of racially degrading imagery associated with such episodes. If the slave’s annihilation entailed “the condition of gazing, claiming, supervising, delighting, penetrating, climaxing, and maiming at will” (Johnson River 171), this reserved scene of subjection suggests Roper’s desire, even in the greatest torment, to claim the integrity of the subject. Ironically, for this nearly white African American slave, there are no racial markings in the passage at all. He is simply a victim in the grip of a monstrous machine. Once again, it is Kincaid’s exploration of blackness that suggests the creative potential of this stance. In Kincaid’s formulation, blackness is both integral with and separate from her body and nature. Although blackness flows through her veins, it is not an element of her blood. The

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“word” may define her, but she is soon lost in an encompassing absence, both empty and full, embracing and canceling her experience. In this state, she asserts, “I can no longer point to myself and say ‘I.’” Her voice silenced, she is absorbed by an effacement that enhances consciousness. Neither social death nor definitive liberation, this experience, Kincaid seems to suggest, is a creative matrix suspended over an empty place in which the eclipse, even the destruction of the self, is liberating. If, as Johnson has argued, the tenor of recent scholarship on slavery has stressed either agency or submission, Kincaid’s meditation seems to offer a third alternative, neither dialogic nor dialectical, but rather a fusion of subject and subjection. To put this another way, blackness, for Kincaid, entails a subject coming to self-knowledge through its exposure to the claims, even the annihilating claims, of the other. That condition of absolute exposure, as Emmanuel Levinas argues, is another name for the ethical. * * * While Benjamin’s penetrating comments on emergency, in “On the Concept of History,” suggest a desire to incorporate a phenomenological awareness of his own impositions in the deliberative act, it is fair to say that he did not live to complete the project. James Dodd’s haunting perception that “the intelligibility of violence is … determined by the violence of intelligibility” presents a profoundly ethical challenge to any reflection that would account for trauma. If critical thought itself aspires to sovereignty, how could that instrument hope to penetrate an experience situated in the gap between intelligibility and violence? In “On the Concept of History,” Benjamin seems to offer a method of apprehension through historical materialism and the dialectical image, but not the content or rule of its application. To be sure, he returned, almost obsessively, to the broad range of his earlier thought that promised mystical revelation to the inspired thinker; but for the despairing thinker, trapped at the border, who had so often employed violence as a metaphor for reflection, there seemed no secure refuge, no utopian assurance. In what way, then, could a dialectic of violence yield an affirmative vision? An answer emerges from the work of a younger contemporary addressing the problem of structural violence, Emmanuel Levinas. Levinas’s thought, Robert Eaglestone observes, is a response to the Holocaust through an interrogation of Western metaphysics.46 Tracing the problem to the imperial desire reflected in Hegel’s master-slave

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dialectic, Levinas pursues an alternative that rejects both the drive for recognition and the system of representation that such a drive entails. Post-­ Hegelian thought, Levinas argues, has striven to identify “substance and subject” through an “exercis[e] … of will and sovereignty”—an exercise that negates the other by attempting to render it the same.47 For Levinas, as Majid Yar has noted, this struggle over recognition annihilates the other through a “representational anthropophagy” both “voracious and cannibalistic.”48 The Holocaust, it might be argued, was the monstrous projection of this imperative. In response, Levinas, in Totality and Infinity, proposes a reverence for the face of the other, an attitude reversing the violence of recognition through “the relation with infinity … that paralyses my powers and from the depths of defenceless eyes rises firm and absolute in its nudity and destitution.”49 This utter openness, this nakedness of expression and response, envisions nothing less than a renovation of consciousness, an existential shift to an ethic of care. “To manifest oneself as a face,” Levinas asserts, “is to impose oneself above and beyond the manifested and purely phenomenal form”—to signify more than a Hegelian contest of desire. In true desire “are conjoined the movements unto the Height and unto the Humility of the Other” (Totality 200). Only a rigorous embrace of the other, Levinas argues, can reclaim the integrity of the self. The stirring vision of Totality and Infinity, however, is not without contradiction. As Jacques Derrida argued in “Violence and Metaphysics,” Levinas’s claims to have circumvented the imperial violence of thought are fatally compromised. Through a familiar move not unlike Lukács’s analysis of reification, Derrida shows that any subversion of a philosophical tradition must be framed in the historical terms of that tradition, severely limiting the subversive claim. “[T]he attempt to achieve an opening toward the beyond of philosophical discourse, by means of philosophical discourse,” Derrida writes, “cannot possibly succeed within language.”50 Like Walter Johnson’s closed system of repression, the system of language, according to Derrida, encompasses even the most ambitious critiques. That insufficiency, he argues, is tied not merely to discourse, but to consciousness itself. For Derrida, the origin of thought in the perceptions of the individual, the condition of “ipseity” (131), is necessarily a reduction—a “violent” appropriation (116)—of the other. The very “necessity of speaking of the other as other, or to the other as other” wrenches the alter from her frame, reduces her to the same through a “transcendental egology” that

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constitutes “violence itself” (128–29). Neither the system of thought nor the conventions of address allow an evasion of the imperial self. It was in response to this acute challenge that Levinas revisited his ethical system. That revision, mapped out in essays like “Substitution” (1968) and later incorporated in Otherwise Than Being (1974), attempts to cleanse discourse through silence and purge violence through trauma. If imperial domination taints language, Levinas argues, one must seek an alternative in the precondition or trace of language, the disposition uniting speakers that Levinas calls “saying.” Whereas the “said” is characterized by the contest and reduction of meaning that Derrida associates with ipseity, the saying, as Robert Eaglestone observes, is the “‘publicness’ or openness to the other upon which language is grounded” (142). The saying shifts the work of representation from discourse to what might be called devotion, the “relation to the other” (Eaglestone 122) implied by the structure of language itself. The saying is “the moment of committing oneself to the other,” writes Eaglestone, “a continual process of substitution” (144). Like antimatter or the face of God, the saying can be glimpsed only in its residue or hind parts, in the traces or conditions that make language and being possible. Openness and vulnerability, that is to say, ground representation. It is in his revision of the “nudity” of the face-to-face relation that Levinas is most bracing and controversial. In rejecting the mechanics of Hegelian recognition with its annihilating desire, Levinas argues that authentic openness, beyond language and beyond the said, is nothing less than the capacity to suffer. Responsibility for the other, he claims, is not an act but a condition of consciousness, just as the saying is a condition of language. “The responsibility for the other is the locus in which is situated the null-site of subjectivity.”51 That null-site demands radical revision, a rethinking of the very status of the subject not as center of consciousness but as an object—in linguistic terms, the condition of the accusative state—the other to the other, or what Levinas calls “always [being] under accusation” (“Substitution” 89). As Eaglestone notes (141), Levinas’s late thought, particularly in “Substitution” and Otherwise Than Being, is highly metaphorical. Terms shift, assertions bleed into other assertions; equivalents and conversions abound. Hence, the effort to rethink the self as the object of another entails a family of associations revolving around the ideas of wounding, sacrifice, and trauma. “The ego,” Levinas contends in “Substitution,” is “a susceptibility, or an exposure to wounding and outrage” (86). “[S]acrifice,” he later claims, is “the passage of the

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identical to the other in substitution” (90). “The one is exposed to the other as a skin is exposed to what wounds it” (Otherwise 49). True recognition entails “the risky uncovering of oneself, … the breaking up of inwardness and the … exposure to traumas” (Otherwise 48). In a passage strikingly close to Kincaid’s meditation on blackness, Levinas argues for the ethical character of nothingness: The ego is not merely a being endowed with certain so-called moral qualities, qualities it would bear as attributes. Its exceptional unicity in the passivity of the Passion of the self is the incessant event of substitution, the fact of being emptied of its being, of being turned inside out, the fact of nonbeing. (“Substitution” 91)

Trauma, wounding, sacrifice, passivity: all of these terms suggest what Derrida might call an economy of intention, a porousness of the self allowing—demanding, to use Kincaid’s terms—the erasure and annihilation of form. The very force, the impossibility—one might say the martyrology— of this view suggests Levinas’s attempt to overthrow, perhaps violently overthrow, the edifice of Western thought through a counterviolence of self-sacrifice. For Levinas, “existence, with sacrifice imposed on it” (Otherwise 49) is another name for being. What consequences would this approach entail for a phenomenology of violence in slave narratives? Trauma alone is as unlikely to confer grace or authority as the two thieves crucified with Jesus were candidates for martyrdom. The experience of violence is no more ennobling than the condition of pain. Strictly applying the logic of substitution would seem a fool’s errand: no living being commands the heroic self-effacement of Levinas’s ideal type. But the very extremity of these claims, the audacious attempt to imagine an alternative world structured as the antithesis of our own, suggests a utopian project quite close to Benjamin’s dialectical image, a project that Paul Gilroy calls a “politics of transfiguration.” Such a vision of “social relations” in slave narratives, Gilroy argues, would embrace both the “racial community” and the “screams … of the slave sublime,” slavery’s manifest oppressions and its “unsayable claims to truth” (37). In their silent rejection of Hegelian violence, ex-slave narrators attempt to reimagine annihilation as ethics. Sacrificed, like Levinas’s exemplary self, to the vicious desires of the other, they reconceive that degradation as a call to community—not only, or principally, through the obvious Christian content of their suffering, but, more radically, as a means of reenvisoning

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their relation to others. Through the very constitution of their texts—the language and affiliations, the tropes and conditions of violence and endurance—ex-slave narrators compose an alternative world as rigorously “otherwise” as Levinas’s ethical utopia. Anticipating Levinas, they capture this possibility not through logical appeal but through allusion and metaphor—the shifting relations that shape their narratives as surely as the saying conditions the said. These “unsayable” assertions, the residue of trauma as well as of principled hope, provide the implicit structure of their texts, and through that inverted plenum, a vision of a transfigured world. Such a vision, to appropriate Levinas’s language, “is not a negation … but a disinterestedness, an ‘otherwise than being’” (Otherwise 50). In their disinterested suffering and sacrifice, ex-slave narrators imagine an aesthetic response to violence. The convergence of ethics and violence in these texts necessitates a rethinking of their artistic purpose and structure, which may be said to reproduce the experiential aspect of Benjamin’s fourfold method. Since the 1980s, when literary critics began to respond to the scholarship on slave communities, discussion has centered on the issue of freedom and form. Given the undeniable fragmentation of slavery, successful narratives ought somehow to establish aesthetic distance between bare life and liberating art to unify their fractured experience. Both James Olney and John Sekora denied that unity, arguing that slave narratives could not both demonstrate self-making and satisfy the demands of the genre.52 Like Elkins’s abject victims, they argued, these texts were overwhelmed by the political influence of white sponsors. Much the same approach, to opposite effect, may be found in William Andrews’s To Tell a Free Story, which presents a kind of Bildungsroman in which slave narrators gradually free themselves from generic and institutional constraints to convey their private lives. Freedom involved self-ownership—the psychological elements of experience—and thus a reclamation of dominant norms. This emphasis on “the psychic life of the narrator,“53 the authenticity that would confer freedom, provoked a counter-argument in which critics like Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and Houston Baker resituated the black community. For these writers, authenticity lay in articulating race through vernacular or generic form. To express racial difference, either through signifying or dialogism, was to provide a vision of community made whole through the “power of representation.”54 Freedom arose not from the constraints of white readers but from the cultural resources of the black milieu—Benjamin’s material forms. Similar arguments may be found in the work of Daphne Brooks,

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Hazel Carby, Simon Gikandi, Saidiya Hartman, John Ernest, and others. As Gikandi trenchantly argues, “the performance of a counterculture of taste was essential to the transformation of enslaved Africans from chattel to subjects.”55 Freedom was the performative effect of community. This conversion of aesthetic distance into cultural power is the burden of Gilroy’s The Black Atlantic. It was the slaves’ intimacy with “suicide, flight and silent mourning” (57), he asserts, that shaped an “aesthetics of personalism,” the “[a]uthority and autonomy” (69) decisively emerging from the collective experience of “[b]eing in pain” (203). The structures of freedom arose from the ruins of social—and socially shared—death. But the liberating aesthetic in these critical approaches, as I have argued, depends on a Hegelian overcoming, a flight from the condition of pain. Viewed from within that condition, many slave narratives exhibit a different structure and form. The transfiguration conveyed by these writers is not simply, or primarily, a vision of liberation, the returning to wholeness of a community blighted by suffering. Their stories do not necessarily lead to redemption, cleansing, or the restoration of moral order. Rather, the aesthetic purport of these texts involves a gray zone of shared oppression and responsibility. Just as masters have marked and abused their slaves, so slaves discover themselves in relation to that abuse. They do not simply renounce a corrupt system; they claim ownership in it. The absent signifier in these accounts of violence—the saying conditioning the texts—involves the sharing of abjection. Through networks of allusion and metaphor, ex-­ slave narrators reimagine trauma, fungibility, and the destruction of families as the wounds of an entire society. Master and slave alike suffer under these conditions, but it is the slaves alone, sacrificing most, who sense the culture’s disorder. Perceiving the design behind innumerable acts of cruelty, ex-slave writers transform their lives into what can only be called an aesthetic apprehension—the purposeless purpose of a withering system. Ex-slave narrators uniquely understand and attack this system. In effect, they eviscerate the plenum; but, like restless ghosts, they can’t entirely let it go. That tension gives the most poignant narratives their ethical power. The attempt to apprehend the ethical logic of the slaves’ world may be initially grasped through patterns of infinitation, of repetition associated with trauma. Viewed over the entire range of narratives surveyed here, acts of violence lose their individual character and assume a compulsive quality, as if they were the aberrations of a single troubled actor. Leonard Black underscores this character by calling attention to repeated injuries to the head. His baptism of violence, he recalls, occurred in a kitchen where his

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mistress “knocked me down with the johnny-cake board, cutting my head so badly that it bled more than a quart” (7). Later he sustained head wounds from a shovel and a hoe, and he was kicked in the head by a horse, an injury that took six months to heal (11, 12). Although Black was also branded, cuffed, and repeatedly knocked down, his attention to head wounds suggests both his suffering and his masters’ psychological dependence on this violence—not only for the libidinal and economic satisfactions mentioned earlier, but more acutely as a means of conceiving the plenum and thus ordering their everyday lives. John Jackson gives a poignant, terrifying account of how owners, overseers, and slaves orient themselves to violence. When a new overseer, Burl Quiney, appears on the plantation of one Master English, he is given strict instructions to make an example of someone so as to enforce discipline. His victim is Old Peter, a favored slave of the master’s wife, who objected to Quiney’s easing the task quota of a female slave. When Peter is severely flogged, he appeals to his mistress, whereupon Quiney pursues him to his cabin and forces him, bleeding and broken, to return to the field. Witnessing this brutality, “[t]he slaves immediately surround him … like blackbirds” (17), one of them once again running to Mrs. English, who now protests, “What can I do? go away from there” (17). Quiney’s final act is to tie Peter to a tree and administer another brutal beating; the victim dies a few days later. This tragedy, as Jackson implies, reveals the complex interdependencies of plantation life. Quiney’s favoring a female slave who aroused his sexual interest offended Peter’s sense of fairness, yet in appealing to English he was only underscoring the clash between discipline and desire on the farm: if the mistress was allowed to show favor, why not the overseer? The mistress’s demurral after the second, more brutal attack on her favorite slave was likely caused by Quiney’s own appeal to her master, the slaveowner, yet the second attack allowed the slaves to assert themselves, at least momentarily, as an ethical community defending Old Peter. Notably, Jackson’s testimony casts Quiney’s savagery amid a network of rivalries in which the claims of master and slave intersect. Although this is not quite the field of negotiation and contest imagined by Eugene Genovese in his discussion of slave communities in Roll, Jordan, Roll—it is much too violent for that—the account suggests that the very absence of fungibility in this case skewed Jackson’s response. All parties seemed to be struggling with the problem of how to adjust different measures of value, and it is in the mirroring of Peter, Quiney, and Mistress English that the violence must be understood. The beatings are not only disturbingly sadistic; they

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are also the desperate effects of a system incapable of adjudicating between ethical and economic principles. That confusion overshadows even the slaves’ ethical response, which Jackson taints through its racist association with blackbirds. The only redemption, in this passage, involves the clear-­ eyed depiction of the problem. The plenum itself was discomposed. Two additional accounts of repeated malice suggest the narrators’ acute understanding of their society’s tangled imperatives. The first narrative involves Isaac Mason’s attempt to wed a history of trauma to one of shaky finances and opportunities, and involves a nightmarish chain of interlocking oppressions. When Mason’s owner dies, the executor of the estate, Hugh Wallace, disperses Mason’s family to cover debts. Mason’s lot falls to an abusive cabinet maker named James Mansfield who, along with his equally cruel wife, makes Mason’s life miserable. But his real troubles begin when Wallace’s daughter enters the Mansfield home as housekeeper. The younger Wallace is offended when Mason and the other slaves refuse to eat tainted meat that Mason had helped to secure and butcher. His surreptitiously throwing the food to the dog enrages the family, who must have imagined that he was insulting their largesse. When Mason resists Mansfield’s punishment and runs away he is summoned home and apparently forgiven, but not for long. Colluding with Wallace, Mansfield sends his slave to the latter’s plantation, ostensibly to procure more meat. Instead, he is met by two slaves who attempt to beat him, only to be repulsed. “In my struggles,” Mason writes, “I looked on them as men in slavish bondage like myself, and executors of a master’s will” (33). Although Mason may attempt to resist that will, refuse the corruption, he cannot stand apart from it. It meets him at every turn, shapes his experience, and determines his actions. Mason had taken great pride, for example, in his industry on Mansfield’s farm, performing so well that for five years he had not received a single blow. After a successful harvest, he is rewarded with a new suit of clothes and a commission to deliver the produce to Baltimore. Mason executes this task, but, once in the city, sustains a brutal beating on the street. Although Mansfield was not responsible for the attack, the assault is richly metaphoric. The slave who was sacrificed by daily beatings in Mansfield’s cellar carries an offering to the city gods, only to be sacrificed again. His resistance cannot be understood apart from the consuming interests of his masters. It is Mason’s achievement to ground this insight in a perception of structural violence, a global reading stemming from his own sacrifice and wounds, a history of corruption. Yet the wounding and sacrifice, he shrewdly acknowledges, the rot and taint, are universal.

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This aesthetically ordered pattern of trauma and corruption is nowhere more stunningly depicted than in Moses Roper’s Narrative. Among all the accounts here surveyed, Roper’s is most insistent on the mutual involvement of master and slave in a system of shared violence. He suffers more extravagantly, resists more compellingly, and demonstrates the utter futility of lives centered on ownership and defiance. For Roper, who endured seventeen masters in his first nineteen years, life had the character of a wicked fairy tale. Born so light-skinned that his mistress was outraged, the infant nearly died when “she got a large club-stick and knife and hastened to the place in which my mother was confined,” where his grandmother rescued him (7). This vulnerability pursues him like a nemesis. By the age of thirteen he is flogged “very severely” “nearly every day” (10), an affliction that leads him to run away, “half naked,” to the woods (10). Jailed and sold for fees, he is unloaded on another master, “got a severe flogging of one hundred lashes” for yet another escape, returns, and is flogged again (11). The most disturbing instance of this treatment involves his relatively lengthy tenure with Mr. Gooch, with whom he is locked in an intensifying spiral of resistance and abuse. When Gooch apprehends him after one escape, he chains Roper to his chaise and drags him fifteen miles to his plantation, there tethering him to a log and forcing him to grub trees in a swamp. But Roper slips his “irons” and is soon off, stealing a canoe and plunging into the “wilderness” (11). When he is again recaptured, Gooch lashes him, placing a twenty-five-pound chain around his neck and driving him into the field. More escapes follow, each apprehension met with a more severe punishment until Gooch literally sets Roper’s head on fire (28), all without evident effect. Gooch finally comes to recognize what all Roper’s owners understood: that the only remedy to his resistance was jail and a forced sale. But Roper’s artistry is evident in more than the disturbing catalogue of his sufferings. Like the account of his infancy, these contests have an almost fictive structure—half-parodic, half-­ tragic—a spiraling logic underscoring the calculated rage of the master and the uncanny rebellion of the slave. It is Roper’s acuity, however, that elevates such episodes above mere polemic. Hovering over every repetition of cruelty is the color of his skin. A white man with tangled hair, tall and imposing, Roper was a warning to all masters of the instability of their system of signs. “[H]e could not sell me,” Roper notes of one master, “people objecting to my being rather white” (8, 9). His sufferings were the twin of his disturbing appearance—an athletic young white man forced to embody the vicious contradictions of slavery. Seldom has a slave

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narrator more deftly exposed the hollowness of American claims to freedom, tied, as they are here, to the most ruthless oppression. It is no wonder that Gooch wanted not only to lacerate Roper’s body, but, by setting fire to his head, to efface him as well. Roper’s linkage of trauma and freedom suggests the critical achievement of these slave narrators. By exposing the mutual corruptions of slavery, they suggest that trauma extends beyond the slave’s experience to mark the material relations of bodies. Social death is not merely an ascription applied to the enslaved, these narratives argue, but a shared condition; and if oppressors lose their humanity by enforcing hellish strictures, it is no less true that the slaves’ pursuit of freedom does not release them from the taint. The economy of objects and bodies collapses social space, a condition narrators capture by attempting to upend Adam Smith’s paradigm. If, in polite society, Smith argued, the other’s pain is inaccessible, in slave society, the other’s body becomes forcibly one’s own. To be sure, this assumption originated with racist masters, who made few distinctions among slaves: disciplining one slave rather than another, as Lewis Clarke recognized, was of no more consequence than striking a horse or plucking a weed. When Israel Campbell was captured after running away, both he and his “old Aunt Fanny” were severely whipped (21), as if a doubling of the punishment would underscore the crime. William Grimes recalls a similar episode of fiendish equivalence. When a fellow slave was ordered to whip Grimes for a minor infraction, the master, dissatisfied with the punishment, ordered Grimes to whip his assailant in turn. Still not satisfied, the master again changed roles. “Then Gabriel knew what the old man meant, … to whip me as severely as lay in his power” (21). Jacob Green captures the absurdity of such rituals in his master’s decision to punish every slave he owns when Green successfully lies about setting all the horses loose, and escapes the whipping (14). But such equivalential chains were not limited to slaves. When his master wanted to discipline James Smith for an infraction at sea, “he put my head between his legs” and mercilessly whipped him (19). Here the discipline seems to be exacted on a single, polymorphous body, and it is only a step from this occasion to the literal sharing of attributes. Running from pursuing hounds, John Jackson recalls, he had the presence of mind to impersonate his master. After hearing his master cry “Suboy! suboy! catch him!” (15) and clap his hands, Jackson imitates the command as the dogs close in, and watches as they take off after another, imaginary quarry. To the pursuing animals, master and slave seem one.

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Once again, it is the perception of corrupt equivalence—this time in the work of Jacob Green—that best captures the condition. In an intricate narrative, Green traces the circulation of violence through and upon the bodies of masters and slaves—an account embracing both the tainted consumption evoked by Mason and the transfer of cruelty suggested by mutual whippings. When he was twelve, Green recalls, he nearly killed himself when, attempting to imitate his dram-drinking master, he consumed a bottle of oxalic acid, escaping poisoning only by plunging his head into a milk pail. That piece of dark comedy provides the prologue to a tale of mutual corruption. When a Mr. Burmey punishes Green for quarreling with a white boy, Green takes vicious revenge by stuffing Burmey’s pipe with gunpowder. The victim is literally blackened with his first puff. That Burmey was conducting an adulterous affair with Green’s mistress suggests that both slave and adulterer have tasted corruption. Green’s aptitude for savage satire is nowhere more evident than in a subsequent sequence involving a slave woman named Mary, who will be pivotal in the episode’s tragic conclusion. Despairing of winning her favors, Green concocts a scheme in which he will appear to hang himself from lovelorn misery, summoning Mary at the last moment to save him. “[H]ang on if you are fool enough” (17) is her indifferent reply, and it is all Green can do to preserve life as the stool on which he is standing topples over. He is saved by a Dr. Tillotson, whose son attempts to rape Mary in a subsequent scene, an outrage averted when Mary’s lover, Dan, assaults the attacker. Burmey’s sons lead the lynch party and glory in Dan’s agonies as he is burned alive, yet it is also Burmey’s sons who, but a few months later, are consumed in a fire in a nearby barn. Masters and slaves, Green powerfully demonstrates, are engulfed by a common holocaust. What the preface to Austin Steward’s Twenty-Two Years a Slave calls the “history … as it were [of] his own body, with the marks and scars … upon it” conveys the brutal economy of life in the slave South.56 Yet the account is also a skewed version of Levinasian ethics. Amid the savagery of slavery, sacrifice, openness, even the merging with others are equal formulas for despair. Perhaps the most powerful evidence of corruption involves this loss of form and substance amid the onslaught of violence. Scenes in which the blood of slaves runs in puddles at their feet, streaming down amid horrid oaths and outcries, are all too common in slave narratives, which used such graphic, if melodramatic conventions to evoke the inhumanity of slavery. But such episodes do more than stimulate outrage or pity: they provide at least a glimpse of how abjection may veil utopian community. If bodies

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may be universally assaulted and exchanged, their reduction to fluids allows a commingling that is literally visceral, beyond the markers of racial identity. Such fluid wastes, as Julia Kristeva argues, signify “the border of my condition as a living being,” the point at which the individual experiences “the breaking down of [the] world.”57 This dissolution of the self, a violent equivalent of Kincaid’s blackness, provides one version of the saying marking slave narratives—the substitution of self for others. One poignant scene in James Smith’s narrative may stand for many. In an act of unfathomable cruelty, an overseer suspends his victim from a tree and mercilessly lashes the extended body “till the blood streamed and reddened the ground underneath where he hung.” “I looked at him as he passed,” Smith adds “and saw the great ridges in his back as the blood was pouring out of them, and it was as a dagger to my heart” (15). Far from diminishing the impact of the scene, the conventional imagery—the blood streaming and pouring—literally sharpens it, as the evocation of the dagger suggests. Smith attempts to capture that sensation of creeping dread— the lift of the bowels or the tingling of the spine—that is often felt at the sight of suffering, suggesting that he, too, has internalized the pain. This is not the canonical alienation from another’s suffering prescribed by Adam Smith; it is a literal incorporation. The very streaming and pouring of the wounds evokes an exchange of fluids, as in the conversion of water into blood, and back again. John Thompson sounds the range of these themes when he depicts his mother bathing and dressing his wounds with her tears (21)—a substitute for the brine that masters often used to cure and torment their slaves’ scarred backs—and in the horrid effects of another beating. When his master whips a fellow slave, “the flesh so cleaved from the bone, that it might easily have been scraped off with the hand; while the blood stood in puddles under her feet” (39). While the revolting decomposition of her body suggests abjection, the image of the hand, like that of the puddles or the stabbed heart, conveys a material transfer of pain, an “expos[ure] to the other,” to cite Levinas, “as a skin is exposed to what wounds it.” Far from even the most ardent scene of subjection, such imagery suggests an elemental, nearly utopian exchange. Some slave narrators take these border crossings more literally. Grimes, for example, artfully merges the equivalence of slaves’ bodies with the disturbance of spirits. In a sequence centering on a “witch” named Frankee, he relates how a fellow slave who closely resembled him took an umbrella, a crime for which Grimes was severely punished. Although the master was simply venting his spleen over his wayward possessions, Grimes imagines

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that the umbrella was actually spirited away by Frankee, who soon enters his sleep. Feeling that “singular sensation, such as people generally call the night-mare” (52), Grimes experiences his will drain as she approaches. When she covers his body, “I was then entirely speechless, making a noise like one apparently choking or strangling” (29). Other encounters follow, including “a large bright, sparkling pair of eyes … staring me full in the face” (36)—a sensation aroused as he occupies a dead man’s bed. This mingling of bodies and psyches, attended by nightmarish silence, suggests the permeability of open wounds, a substitution of sufferers implicit in the relation of the saying to the said. The decaying, fearful states of consciousness evoke a confusion or merging of experience captured, with a similar anxiety, in narrators’ reports of fugue states. Grimes recounts how, drowsy while he awaited his mistress in her carriage, he had trouble navigating his waking life as he drove home: “I did not know where I was, where I had been, nor where I was a going” (39). Smith recalls a Sabbath incident where the trancelike worship of the meeting house carried over into his return walk. Falling asleep on his feet, he barely recognizes his surroundings and awakes in a ditch filled with water (27). Here the fluidity of consciousness evokes a larger community of mystics and martyrs as well as of traumatic suffering and pain,58 as his lying in the ditch suggests drowning and, perhaps, the Middle Passage. Smith’s walk summons a shared blackness, a transfiguration dissolving thought and life itself. At their most poignant, such scenes of abjection convey the mixed metaphors of slave narratives. Steeped in violence, these texts convert trauma and silence into a vision of communion tied to shared sacrifice and the erasure of boundaries. If this vision is not quite the ecstatic yielding to nothingness articulated in Kincaid’s blackness, it is nevertheless an attempt to convey an ethical stance from the material conditions of slaves’ lives. Rather than transcending those conditions in visions of jubilee or Christian redemption, the texts seek to ground ethics in an experience of abjection, transfigured, through exposure to others, into a condition of utter commonality. But if trauma evokes limitless sharing, the relinquishing of the will, it also underscores continued oppression, the absence of will. In slave narratives, that is to say, the painful contradictions of antebellum life cannot be dissolved in ringing endorsements of freedom. The saying, as Levinas would contend, is only a fleeting shadow of the said. * * *

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One sees these contradictions most acutely in Henry Bibb’s Life, the ethical masterpiece of the genre. Bibb sounds the range of issues discussed in this chapter—the experience of terror and the power of silence, the crossing of boundaries and the sacrificial substitutions, the threat of corruption and the heroic yielding of self. Yet despite his hard-won freedom and formidable activism, Bibb, too, seems haunted by his past, incapable of overcoming his grief. The text is marked by what Ian Baucom calls melancholy, that “traumatic sympathy” incorporating “the lost, damaged, ruined object within … the self.”59 Bibb’s heroic narrator can imagine, but cannot transcend, the conditions that might free him from social death. As he avers, “The term slave to this day sounds with terror to my soul—a word too obnoxious to speak, a system too intolerable to be endured” (18). Shadowing his uncanny devotion to others is the silent seal of what he has witnessed. While Bibb’s trials mirror those of other writers—he, too, is hired out while still quite young, changes owners frequently, and demonstrates a talent for running away—his story coalesces around his marriage to Malinda, a union at which he momentarily hesitates lest it mar his determination to escape north. The marriage, and the daughter, Frances, it produces, sets Bibb on a treacherous and wayward course that, at times, seems as much driven by self-assertion as by selflessness. Insisting that he must depart, he sets out alone for Canada in 1837, “one of the most self-­ denying acts” of his life (46). Like countless runaways before and after, Bibb would not risk conveying his family before trying the route himself. Nevertheless, shadowing his self-denial is the unmistakable language of self-making, the terms of recognition so common in the period. “I must forsake friends and neighbors, wife and child,” he declares with Emersonian conviction, “or consent to live and die a slave” (47). When he is betrayed, recaptured in Cincinnati, and returned to Kentucky, he mourns the wasted “sacrifice and struggling” (62). Another escape ends in similar failure when Malinda cannot join him in Canada. His return to Kentucky after this momentary triumph is vivid evidence of his self-sacrifice, but it also precipitates the tragic action that will immure his wife and daughter in the deep South. “When I remember that my daughter, my only child, is still there,” he laments, “it is too much to bear.” The signal act of his ethical life, the self-sacrifice “of being a father and a husband of slaves” (44), is also his gravest error. These contradictions emerge in two nodal points in the text, two gray zones rich in metaphor. When Bibb is jailed in Louisville after his second

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return, he is stunned by the intensity of the scene. In the prison yard he sees men at hard labor, “[s]ome … sawing stone, some cutting stone, and others breaking stone,” a sight so miserable, in its amplification of pain, that it makes him think of hell, “with all its terrors of torment” (92). Most terrifying, perhaps, was the democracy of the suffering. Among the prisoners were not only slaves but also “many whites … loaded down with irons”—a confusion and confluence of bodies. If anyone desired a first-­ hand sense of the “contaminating influence of Southern slavery” (92), Bibb declares, let him spend an hour in that yard, amid every corruption known to humankind. “[U]nder such influences,” he concludes, invoking the paternalist rationale, “it was impossible … to avoid pollution” (94). Ironically, it is the white prisoners who prove most sympathetic, concocting various schemes to free Bibb, who is finally redeemed by the trader who owned him in an attempt to find a buyer. Clearly Bibb’s portrait of the prison is occasioned by his anxiety and impotence in protecting his family: he discovers later that the trader, Garrison, attempted to rape his wife. But the section also suggests broader concerns involving the confusion of bodies and values in slave society. The Louisville prison embodies social death. Bibb’s fierce dedication and acuity have one unanticipated effect. Unlike so many families sent to market, he is able to keep his own together. Buyers are so wary of him that Garrison finally gives him free hand. He finds a master in the sadistic Deacon Whitfield, who, much like Simon Legree, is assembling a coffle for his Red River plantation. The torments on this farm lead to a series of renewed escape attempts culminating in the text’s second nodal point, the flight to the Red River island discussed above. Surrounded, with his frightened family, by wolves, Bibb suffers a double dose of terror. Like the prison, the island is a gray zone in which Bibb loses nearly all his bearings: I thought of God, thought of the devil, I thought of hell; and I thought of heaven … I was so much excited by the fierce howling of the savage wolves, and the frightful screams of my little family, that … I thought the time of my departure had come at last. (126)

Here, once again, is the annihilation attending social death, enforced by Bibb’s admission that he is “entirely unable to describe” what he was feeling (126). Yet it is also a moment of extreme abjection and self-­sacrifice, the very essence of substitution, conveyed in Bibb’s disorientation, his

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sense that past and future, heaven and hell, animal and human predators, were convertible. The hell that indeed awaited them upon recapture—the vicious punishments that Bibb endured and his subsequent sale and departure, never to return—suggested that heaven was far indeed. No greater melancholy could be imagined than Bibb’s parting scene: Malinda clinging to him, refusing to be separated even as Whitfield mercilessly lashes her. A sacrificial substitute for his own immolation, she confirms the chilling limits of ethical action under slavery. In his constant crossing between slavery and freedom—at one point while seeking a master in Louisville he is mistaken for a white slave trader (107)—Bibb embodies the ethical contradictions of his era. Like a restless ghost, he shuttles between self-possession and social death, haunted at last by his own family and by the betrayal of his wife, ultimately forced to bear her master’s children. In his trials, his audacity, and his failures, Bibb exposes the crisis of slave society. His vision of freedom, the utopian conviction driving the narrative, is shaped by the violence that sustains it, the words he uses shadowed by a shared corruption. Amid such dangers, slave narrators, like the voices of women at prayer in Morrison’s novel, “searched for … the key, the code, the sound that broke the back of words” (Morrison 261). In expressing the inexpressible, these writers strove to redeem themselves, but their pain found no redeeming language, and no home.

Notes 1. Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993), 68. Subsequent citations will appear parenthetically in the text. 2. Houston Baker, The Journey Back: Issues in Black Literature and Criticism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), 31. Subsequent citations will appear parenthetically in the text. 3. The phrase “originary violence” appears in Jacques Derrida’s Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), 37. For Levinas, see note 52, below. 4. Jennifer Fleischner, in her study of women’s slave narratives, refers to the Freudian “compulsion to repeat,” but she is more interested in symbolic themes than in patterns of trauma. See Mastering Slavery: Memory, Family, and Identity in Women’s Slave Narratives (New York: New York University Press, 1996), 20–21, 26–27. Dwight McBride discusses the rhetorical effect of horrifying experience in Impossible Witnesses: Truth, Abolitionism, and Slave Testimony (New York: New York University Press, 2001), 89–94.

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On social death, see Orlando Patterson, Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1982). For Morrison’s novels and trauma, see J. Brooks Bouson, Quiet as It’s Kept: Shame, Trauma, and Race in the Novels of Toni Morrison (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2000); Tim Armstrong, The Logic of Slavery: Debt, Technology, and Pain in American Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 173–82; Evelyn Schreiber, Race, Trauma, and Home in the Novels of Toni Morrison (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2010); Kristen Boudreau, “Pain and the Unmaking of Self in Toni Morrison’s Beloved,” Contemporary Literature 36 (1995): 447–65; and Naomi Morgenstern, “Mother’s Milk and Sister’s Blood: Trauma and the Neoslave Narrative,” Differences 8 (1996): 101–26. See also Lee Gilmore, The Limits of Autobiography: Trauma and Testimony (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2001). 5. Ruth Leys, Trauma: A Genealogy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 229–30, 249; Dori Laub (citing Nadine Francesco), “Bearing Witness, or the Vicissitudes of Listening,” in Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History, ed. Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub (New York: Routledge, 1992), 64. See also Judith Herman, Trauma and Recovery (New York: Basic Books, 1992); Susan Brison, “Trauma Narratives and the Remaking of the Self,” Acts of Memory: Cultural Recall in the Present, ed. Mieke Bal, Jonathan Crewe, and Leo Spitzer (Hanover: University Press of New England, 1999), 39–54; Brison, Aftermath: Violence and the Remaking of a Self (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002); Bessel van der Kolk, “Trauma and Memory,” Traumatic Stress: The Effects of Overwhelming Experience on Mind, Body, and Society, ed. Bessel van der Kolk, Alexander McFarlane, and Lars Weisaeth (New York: Guilford Press, 1996), 279–302; van der Kolk, Onno van der Hart, and Charles Marmar, “Dissociation and Information Processing in Posttraumatic Stress Disorder,” Traumatic Stress, 303–27; and Dominick LaCapra, Writing History, Writing Trauma, 2nd ed. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014). 6. Cathy Caruth, Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), 62. 7. My discussion here is drawn from Caruth, 63–69. 8. Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, trans. James Strachey (New York: Norton, 1961), 35; Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), 27–59. 9. Immanuel Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, ed. Paul Guyer; trans. Paul Guyer and Eric Matthews (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 152; cf. Kant, Kritik der Urteilskraft (Leipzig: Meiner, 1922), 116.

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10. Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain, 32. Subsequent citations will appear parenthetically in the text. See also Edward Baptist, The Half Has Never Been Told, 121, 139–42. 11. Primo Levi, The Drowned and the Saved, trans. Raymond Rosenthal (New York: Vintage, 1989), 58; Ñacuñán Sáez, “Torture: A Discourse on Practice,” Tattoo, Torture, Mutilation, and Adornment: The Denaturalization of the Body in Culture and Text, ed. Frances Mascia-Lees and Patricia Sharpe (Albany: State University of New  York Press, 1992), 138. 12. Saidiya Hartman, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 21. Subsequent citations will appear parenthetically in the text. 13. Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Figures in Black: Words, Signs, and the “Racial” Self (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 93. 14. Daphne Brooks, Bodies in Dissent: Spectacular Performances of Race and Freedom, 1850–1910 (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006), 5. Brooks derives the phrase “powerful stillness” from Hortense Spillers’s “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book,” Diacritics 17 (1987): 66. 15. Jeannine DeLombard, “‘Eye-Witness to Cruelty’: Southern Violence and Northern Testimony in Frederick Douglass’s 1845 Narrative,” American Literature 73 (2001): 256. 16. Judith Butler, Subjects of Desire: Hegelian Reflections in Twentieth-­Century France (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987), 52. 17. Georg Friedrich Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977), 118. 18. Jamaica Kincaid, At the Bottom of the River (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1983), 46–47. 19. Harriet Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, ed. Jean Fagan Yellin (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1987), 3. Subsequent citations will appear parenthetically in the text. 20. “Leaves from a Slave’s Journal of Life,” Slave Testimony: Two Centuries of Letters, Speeches, Interviews, and Autobiographies, ed. John Blassingame (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1977), 151. Subsequent citations will appear parenthetically in the text. 21. William Wells Brown, Narrative of William W.  Brown, A Fugitive Slave (1847), Documenting the American South, https://docsouth.unc.edu/ neh/brown47/brown47.html, 39–40. Subsequent citations from this electronic edition will appear parenthetically in the text. Unless otherwise noted, citations from slave narratives will be drawn from the docsouth archive, ­designated, for each entry, by html address. In all instances, additional citations from the same source will be provided parenthetically. I

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have chosen only narratives written, so far as I have been able to determine, by the narrators themselves, checking each text against available bibliographic information. Peter Bruner’s narrative is the sole exception: it was co-written with his daughter. 22. Israel Campbell, An Autobiography. Bond and Free: Or, Yearnings for Freedom (1861), https://docsouth.unc.edu/neh/campbell/campbell. html, 18. 23. James Pennington, The Fugitive Blacksmith (1849), https://docsouth. unc.edu/neh/penning49/penning49.html, iv. On plantation violence, see Kenneth Stampp, The Peculiar Institution: Slavery in the Ante-Bellum South (New York: Knopf, 1956), 174–88. 24. John Thompson, The Life of John Thompson, a Fugitive Slave (1856), https://docsouth.unc.edu/neh/thompson/thompson.html, 41. 25. Henry Bibb, Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Henry Bibb (1849), https://docsouth.unc.edu/neh/bibb/bibb.html, 75. 26. Peter Bruner, A Slave’s Adventures Toward Freedom (1918), https://docsouth.unc.edu/neh/bruner/bruner.html, 30. 27. Leonard Black, The Life and Sufferings of Leonard Black (1847), https:// docsouth.unc.edu/neh/black/black.html, 13. See also Walter Johnson, River of Dark Dreams, 174. 28. William Grimes, Life of William Grimes, the Runaway Slave (1825, 2nd ed. 1855), 83, https://docsouth.unc.edu/neh/grimes55/menu.html. For critical comment, see William Andrews, To Tell a Free Story: The First Century of Afro-American Autobiography, 1760–1865 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1986), 81; Ann Fabian, The Unvarnished Truth: Personal Narratives in Nineteenth-Century America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), 54–55; Lindon Barrett, “African-American Slave Narratives: Literacy, the Body, Authority,” American Literary History 7 (1995): 435–36; Jon-Christian Suggs, “African American Literature and Legal History,” Law and Literature 22 (2010), 333; and Charles Nichols, “The Case of William Grimes, the Runaway Slave,” William and Mary Quarterly, 8 (1951): 552–60. 29. Jacob Green, Narrative of the Life of J.  D. Green (1864), https://docsouth.unc.edu/neh/greenjd/greenjd.html, 8. 30. Marcus Wood, Slavery, Empathy, and Pornography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 97. Subsequent citations will appear parenthetically in the text. 31. On this general point, cf. Wood, Slavery, 98–106. 32. Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass (1845), docsouth.unc.edu/neh/douglass/douglass.html, 107–109. 33. William Green, Narrative of the Events in the Life of William Green (1853), https://docsouth.unc.edu/neh/greenw/greenw.html, 12; Grimes 44

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(striking a black driver); Bruner 17; Isaac Mason, Life of Isaac Mason as a Slave (1893), https://docsouth.unc.edu/fpn/mason/mason.html, 15, 26, 33; Thompson 54. See also Kenneth Stampp, Peculiar Institution, 125–32; Michael Wayne, Death of an Overseer: Reopening a Murder Investigation from the Plantation South (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001); Margaret Abruzzo, Polemical Pain: Slavery, Cruelty, and the Rise of Humanitarianism (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011), 184–85; and Jeff Forret, Race Relations at the Margins: Slaves and Poor Whites in the Antebellum Southern Countryside (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2006), 121, 182. For an account of the black abolitionist embrace of violence, particularly after 1850, see Kellie Carter Jackson, Force and Freedom: Black Abolitionists and the Politics of Violence (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019). 34. Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, ed. Knud Haakonssen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 12 (I.1.2). For an account of abolitionist responses to sympathy, see Gay Cima, Performing Anti-­ Slavery: Activist Women on Antebellum Stages (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 39–72. On the apprehension of pain, see also Margaret Abruzzo, Polemical Pain, 158–73; Elizabeth Clark, “‘The Sacred Rights of the Weak’: Pain, Sympathy, and the Culture of Individual Rights in Antebellum America,” Journal of American History 82 (1955): 463–93; Karen Halttunen, “Humanitarianism and the Pornography of Pain in Anglo-American Culture,” American Historical Review 100 (1995): 303–34; and Carolyn Sorisio, “The Spectacle of the Body: Torture in the Antislavery Writing of Lydia Maria Child and Frances E. W. Harper,” Modern Language Studies 30 (2000): 45–66. 35. John Jackson, The Experience of a Slave in South Carolina (1862), https:// docsouth.unc.edu/fpn/jackson/jackson.html, 21–22. 36. James Lindsay Smith, Autobiography of James L. Smith (1881), https:// docsouth.unc.edu/neh/smithj/smithj.html, 11. 37. Jacob Stroyer, My Life in the South (1885), docsouth.unc.edu/neh/ stroyer85/stroyer85.html, 22. 38. Moses Roper, Narrative of the Adventures and Escape of Moses Roper from American Slavery (1848), https://docsouth.unc.edu/neh/roper/roper. html, 28. For a similar account, see Edward Baptist, The Half Has Never Been Told, 141. 39. Elizabeth Keckley, Behind the Scenes, or, Thirty Years a Slave, and Four Years in the White House (1868), https://docsouth.unc.edu/neh/keckley/keckley.html, 34. 40. Walter Johnson, River of Dark Dreams, 162. Subsequent citations will appear parenthetically in the text.

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41. Stanley Elkins, Slavery: A Problem in American Institutional and Intellectual Life (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1959), 81–139; John Blassingame, The Slave Community: Plantation Life in the Antebellum South, rev. ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979), 284. On slaves’ alleged capacity for pain, see also Margaret Abruzzo, Polemical Pain, 174–81. 42. The long list of slave community studies includes Eugene Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll; Ira Berlin, Many Thousands Gone; Stephanie Camp, Closer to Freedom: Enslaved Women and Everyday Resistance in the Plantation South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004); William Dusinberre, Strategies for Survival: Recollections of Bondage in Antebellum Virginia (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2009); Philip Morgan: Slave Counterpoint: Black Culture in the Eighteenth Century Chesapeake and Lowcountry (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998); George Rawick, From Sundown to Sunup: The Making of the Black Community (Westport: Greenwood, 1972); Walter Johnson, Soul by Soul: Life Inside the Antebellum Slave Market (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999); Drew Gilpin Faust, “Culture and Community: The Meaning of Power on an Ante-Bellum Plantation,” Journal of Social History 14 (1980): 83–97; and Roger Abrahams, Singing the Master: The Emergence of African American Culture in the Plantation South (New York: Pantheon, 1992). For critiques of the slave community thesis, see Jeff Forret, “Conflict and the ‘Slave Community’: Violence among Slaves in Upcountry South Carolina,” Journal of Southern History 74 (2008): 551–88; and Peter Kolchin, “Reevaluating the Antebellum Slave Community: A Comparative Perspective,” Journal of American History 70 (1983): 579–601. 43. Stanley Elkins, Slavery: A Problem in American Institutional and Intellectual Life, 3rd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976), 301. 44. See also Walter Johnson, “On Agency,” Journal of Social History 37 (2003): 113–24. 45. Johnson, “On Agency,” 116. 46. Robert Eaglestone, Ethical Criticism: Reading after Levinas (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1997), 137. My approach to Levinas has been informed by Eaglestone’s indispensable study. Subsequent citations will appear parenthetically in the text. 47. Emmanuel Levinas, “Substitution,” Basic Philosophical Writings, ed. Adrian Peperzak, Simon Critchley, and Robert Bernasconi (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996), 83, 82. Subsequent citations will appear parenthetically in the text. 48. Majid Yar, “Recognition and the Politics of Human(e) Desire,” Theory, Culture and Society 18 (2001): 63.

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49. Levinas, Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1969), 199–200. Subsequent citations will appear parenthetically in the text. 50. Jacques Derrida, “Violence and Metaphysics: An Essay on the Thought of Emmanuel Levinas,” Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), 110. Subsequent citations will appear parenthetically in the text. 51. Levinas, Otherwise than Being, or Beyond Essence, trans. Alphonso Lingis (1981; Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1998), 10. Subsequent citations will appear parenthetically in the text. 52. James Olney, “‘I Was Born’: Slave Narratives, Their Status as Autobiographical Literature,” Callaloo 20 (1984): 46–73; John Sekora, “Black Message/White Envelope: Genre, Authenticity, and Authority in the Antebellum Slave Narrative,” Callaloo 32 (1987): 482–515. 53. William Andrews, To Tell a Free Story, 65. 54. Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Figures in Black, 104. See also Gates, The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African-American Literary Criticism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988); and Houston Baker, Blues, Ideology, and Afro-American Literature: A Vernacular Theory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984). 55. See Daphne Brooks, Bodies in Dissent; Hazel Carby, Race Men (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998); Simon Gikandi, Slavery and the Culture of Taste (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011); Hartman, Scenes of Subjection; John Ernest, Chaotic Justice: Rethinking African American Literary History (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009); and Frances Foster Smith, Witnessing Slavery: The Development of AnteBellum Slave Narratives (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1979). The Gikandi citation appears on 271. 56. Austin Steward, Twenty-Two Years a Slave, and Forty Years a Freeman (1857), https://docsouth.unc.edu/fpn/steward/steward.html#steward 106, xii. 57. Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, trans. Leon Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982), 3, 4. 58. On the relation of fugue states to trauma, see Bessel van der Kolk, “Trauma and Memory,” 284. 59. Ian Baucom, Specters of the Atlantic: Finance Capital, Slavery, and the Philosophy of History (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005), 257.

CHAPTER 6

Claiming “Benito Cereno”

In their elusive but powerful claims, ex-slave narrators exposed the inner life of an old regime. Their torturous experience with the internal police gave the lie both to Southern paternalism and to the freedoms it presupposed. Imagining a community bound through insecurity and violence, they anticipated the imperial state of a later era. Indeed, in this regard, ex-slave narrators reproduced, in a more urgent key, the claims of evangelicals who saw insecurity and corruption as the birth pangs of a new order. For these writers and survivors, the Civil War, when it arrived, would merely ratify a private revolution. This chapter addresses the architecture of regime change in the more public claims over Kansas. Beginning in 1854, as Herman Melville gathered the materials for his masterwork, “Benito Cereno,” the prolonged contest over the territory exposed, as never before, the failures of national governance and the impasse of the empty place. In Kansas all the political elements broke down. In a region with few white inhabitants and a substantial Native American presence, the strictures of the internal police and the plenum could not yet take hold. Nor could the more expansive claims of free-state advocates, who relied on tight networks of sympathizers to prosecute a cause that, at times, must have seemed as daunting as missionary work in the wilderness. But beyond these local contingencies, the greatest challenge the antagonists faced involved the problem of representation. In the most significant emergency before the Civil War, both sides © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 J. Fichtelberg, Exceptional Violence and the Crisis of Classic American Literature, American Literature Readings in the 21st Century, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-07845-3_6

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attempted, through legal maneuvers and incendiary action, to impose symbolic unity on a contentious field that refused to cohere. Never before had the republic seen such a contest by white claimants; never had the rules and rituals of the empty place seemed so ineffectual. Kansas represented more than just a territorial challenge: it was a fault line in communal order. By conviction and by design, Melville’s “Benito Cereno” became an allegory of that process. Like the slave narratives, it sought to demonstrate the tragedy of American political forms. To do so, Melville, like Benjamin, sifted the past. By situating Amasa Delano’s account of a slave insurrection during a world war, he exploited a state of exception to mount a critique of racial and sovereign power. His retelling of a slave rebellion addressed the structural elements central to Claude Lefort’s account of the political. In normal circumstances, Lefort argues, political life unfolds through a diffused sense of social order—what I have been calling the plenum—enacted through local and continuously adjusted stagings to preserve authority. In states of exception, however, those attributes collide, as sovereignty is dispersed and stagings proliferate. At such moments the representation of experience as a symbolic continuum that Benjamin terms an “indivisible unity of form and content” (Origin 160) dissolves into an allegorical free-for-all in which “any relationship can mean absolutely anything else” (175). That was the case in Kansas, where political formulas repeatedly failed; but the setting of Melville’s tale on a liberated slave ship under a revolutionary order also exposes the problems of law-making and law-preserving violence that Benjamin addressed in his “Critique.” Melville’s most powerful political tale invites us to assess his representations in the same violent terms. Surprisingly, given Melville’s well-known penchant for philosophical allegory, very few readers have accepted that invitation. For the most part, Cold War-era critics, during the first great wave of Melville scholarship, saw little immediate connection between the writer’s work and politics. “Benito Cereno,” it was claimed, had nothing to do with slavery, but was an allegory of scorned benevolence confronting insurgent evil. In this telling, Amasa Delano’s struggle to exercise the principles of “democratic Christianity” over sinful antagonists faltered in the face of malignity, a face captured in the demonic Babo’s icy death stare haunting the martyred Cereno. The narrative thus registers prophetic anguish in a story of wronged innocence as old as Job or the son of man, played out on a ship at sea. Virtuous postwar Americans, menaced by their own demons abroad, could take comfort in Delano’s poise, his rectitude, and his resolve.1

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Few critics today would accept this reading, heavily influenced by the religious and political concerns of F. O. Matthiessen, Richard Chase, and others.2 The sociological turn in American studies now casts Melville’s master tale in a radically different light, one deeply shadowed by divisions of race and class, of ideology and global power. In our day, “Benito Cereno” is read as an expression of social and intellectual crisis induced by irrepressible conflicts over slavery, liberalism, or imperial desire obstructing legitimate democratic ideals. Yet, like a former era’s need to subdue fears of nuclear apocalypse through a symbolism of good will, our own preoccupation with terror, tyranny, and global extinction has shaped readings no less motivated by the need for a master narrative that would consign crisis to an orderly discourse or field. Thus Eric Sundquist, to cite one of the most powerful recent assessments, claims that Melville’s tale imagines the nation’s imperial entanglements and racial hypocrisy, as seen through the numerous historical links between the mutiny on the San Dominick and the revolution in St. Domingue, its eponymous source. Babo, in this reading, is not the embodiment of malign evil but a committed subversive, the register of “the hidden presence of African culture within an unsuccessfully suppressive European American regime,” and a sign that even the most violent agency has a republican purpose.3 Delano, in turn, represents the betrayal of that purpose through a malign and conventional racism. That captain and rebel are thus situated as the expression of a democratic ethos makes the slave mutiny strangely lawful, the unfolding of an ironic, if self-evident truth. Revolutionary terror becomes a cultural trope like Christianity, settling a barbed tale on the familiar ground of historical precedent, diversity, and “ritual control” (144, 164). The sociological, like the religious, reading provides an origin story over which the critic, if not the protagonist, can assert command. The desire to exercise “ritual control,” to name and demonstrate Melville’s hermeneutical ground, often diminishes the disruptive nature of his art. Perhaps Melville’s most reticent and conflicted text, “Benito Cereno,” as generations of readers have recognized, resists critical synthesis. Abolitionist or natural rights readings supporting the claims of the mutineers are balked by the Africans’ cruelty. Historicist readings that view Delano’s search for order on the San Dominick as an allegory for antebellum wrangling understate the weakness, irresolution, and ruthlessness of Melville’s contestants. Attempts to ascribe ideological terms seem equally suspect in a fictional milieu where all positions are compromised. The critic’s archive is menaced by the story’s gnomic prose, causing one

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to seek out hybrid or recursive forms of authority, or to propose oppositions that a critical reading mediates.4 Maurice Lee provides both a critique and a demonstration of this effect, in arguing that, confronting the exhaustion of political discourse on slavery, Melville constructs a tale of both revolution and counterrevolution, of coded speech and elusive silence. So difficult and conflicted is the novella’s discursive and political field, Lee contends, that we must look elsewhere for meaning—to the savage realism of Niccolò Machiavelli and the brutal authoritarianism of Thomas Hobbes.5 Machiavelli maintains that rulers must act like beasts, Hobbes that they must tame the beastliness in humanity. Together the two suggest the symbolic basis for the political impasse confronting Delano, republican emissary to a slave revolt; yet the formula remains imperfect. “Locks, knots, masks, tableaus,” Lee ironically observes, “read them if you can, dear critic, construct a towering thesis, though the more weight you ask your allegory to bear, the less stable its empire becomes” (141). In this respect, at least, Christian critics had a point: the concept of sin is capacious enough to incorporate and neutralize all grand claims. As Ishmael might well say, “Who ain’t a sinner?” Two recent attempts to address these ambiguities cast a distinctive light on the hermeneutic challenge Melville’s text presents. In Melville and the Idea of Blackness, Christopher Freeburg argues that the blackness once understood as a metaphysical term figures more powerfully as a representation of the traumatic experience at the center of African American life, explored in the previous chapter. Evoking Paul Gilroy’s association of modernity and terror, Freeburg argues that blackness symbolizes limitation and impasse, an expression of loss “so forceful there is often no way to recover.”6 In “Benito Cereno,” blackness suggests a collapse of “any coherent relations with social reality and knowledge” (96), and thus with the structure of domination that slavery entails. To tell the story of slavery on the San Dominick, Freeburg contends, is to tell no story at all, or rather, to depict the erasure of intelligibility. Similar arguments demonstrating the incoherence, rather than the contradictions of discourse have linked Melville’s tale to the law. Jeannine DeLombard argues that the conflict between contractualism and republicanism—the assertion of an equality before the law and the recognition that bargaining and exchange are the lifeblood of democracy—led to a clash of imperatives in which revolting slaves, former commodities, claimed but lost natural rights. “Rebellion alone is inadequate to guarantee the blacks’ independence in a legal regime where they are civilly dead,” DeLombard asserts, yet where

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self-ownership is critical.7 But despite the subtlety of these approaches, the effect of readings like Freeburg’s and DeLombard’s is to subvert or diminish the narrative’s most disturbing quality: its fundamental evasiveness and indecision. To identify a discourse, symbol, or cultural trope, even an unsettled one, as the key to the text is to provide relatively firm ground for a listing vessel. Knowing the pattern illuminates meaning, even when that pattern unsettles meaning. Simultaneously, such remarks tend to distance the text from its historical moment, allowing abstraction to displace critique. If Melville truly engages a metaphysical, social, or historical crisis, assigning the problem to a trope or discourse is to deny his work its disruptive edge. The world looks decidedly different to one adrift, tossed by the storm, than to one calmly observing on shore. In almost all these assessments, the stumbling block is revolutionary violence. In an age of terror, how can we endorse Babo’s liberating cause without in some way embracing the very attitude that made slavery possible, the law-making violence expunging the other? How can we assume stability in a discourse whose very premise is annihilation? Contemporary criticism attempts to provide an answer through a critique of method. In an incisive essay, Dana Luciano associates critical thought with what she calls “counter-monumental narrative.” Contrasting Melville’s art to conventional allegory, which demands a static association of idea and form, Luciano argues that a counter-monumental art disrupts allegory. Melville attacks fixity by exposing Delano’s brittle assumptions as a sham, his claim that the past is irrecoverably “passed” a vivid parody of the monumental mind. But the text, Luciano argues, offers a counter-model of history as a collection of fragments—half-perceptions, furtive gestures, broken speech, the jumbled deposition—as a means of radical agency and reflection. Here, Aranda’s bleached skeleton is the touchstone. Babo’s gruesome spectacle represents both the “proliferation” of meaning, in the demand that every white come and gaze, and the impotence of that sovereign gaze.8 Applied to Benjamin’s political phenomenology, this account suggests the hazards of the chess game, the distortions incurred with every dialectical move. Yet the essay attempts to limit proliferation by making death, not violence, the critical register. Death is abstract and uniform, violence multifarious and volatile. Critical reflection can contend with death, but not with a recalcitrant violence that marks, as both Dodd and Derrida argue, the very nature of thought. As Benjamin ultimately concluded, not even a divine and sovereign counterviolence can redeem such a recalcitrant order. Violence marks both criticism and critique, turning political thought into empty antagonism.

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This excision of violence from critical reflection may be seen in the nearly uniform neglect of the material circumstances attending the composition of “Benito Cereno.” Although writers have examined the tale’s affiliation with abolitionist protests, slave revolts, filibustering campaigns, and the Fugitive Slave Act, each of which attempts to resolve the text’s vertiginous ambiguities, few have seriously addressed the conflicting territorial claims attending the Kansas-Nebraska Act (1854) and their effects in Bleeding Kansas.9 These claims were not merely extensions of the long-­ running debate over slavery; as I shall argue, the national controversy over Kansas rehearsed the debate in a new key, exposing its excesses, contradictions, and murderous incoherence. The difference in Kansas involved the appeal to governance. For the first time, an entity north of the Missouri Compromise line attempted to declare itself a territory and a state open to slavery. That long, labored, and bloody process brought vital urgency to the rigid positions of sectional antagonists. When, in 1855, partisans began a guerilla war, Kansas gave the nation’s political trauma a local habitation and a name. The spectacle of a territory unable to govern itself, and of a federal government unable to impose its will, underscored the material elements of a social and cultural impasse rooted in, but not limited to, slavery. Kansas, to use Benjamin’s terminology, was a literal state of exception forecasting the more agonizing emergency of civil war. In this chapter, then, I argue that “Benito Cereno” is an allegory for the crisis of authority announced by Kansas and its collateral effects in Cuba, a crisis involving a global cultural response to the material and discursive conditions of enslavement, as those conditions affected representation in speech and writing—in Kansas, in Congress, and in Melville’s text. In part, my approach is influenced by critics like Freeburg and DeLombard, who imagine blackness as a trope for cultural dis-ease, and my analysis bears some affinity with the work of other critics, Christian and cultural, who see in Melville’s writing an allegorical attempt to examine crucial ideals through narrative effects and consequences. But there is a critical difference. As Benjamin recognized, the desire to assess cultural expressions as instances of a dominant ethos or trope owes its influence to the authority of the symbol, and ultimately, to the concert of sense and staging creating the illusion of sovereign order. Yet in the empty place of democracy, that order is never secure, but punctuated by the pressures of hegemony and influence that, in extreme cases, provoke exception. This volatile state is dominated by what Benjamin called allegory—a term appropriate both for political representations of Kansas and for artistic representations on

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the San Dominick. The state of exception erupting in and around Kansas exposed the material form of American power in the objective contradictions of slavery, and Melville’s tale imagines a world in which those contradictions both structure and destroy meaning. His allegory probes the very limits of political, cultural, and textual authority. The problem of representation was particularly acute in late 1854, when Melville was writing “Benito Cereno.” The contest over Kansas had quickly taken on monumental proportions, far exceeding the measured mechanism the Constitution had established for incorporating new states. The rapid accession of territory after the Mexican War, precipitating Henry Clay’s “final settlement” in the Compromise of 1850, had provoked a flood of claims and counterclaims, as advocates, North and South, undertook a feverish search for origin stories, accounts of the meaning and purpose—the sense—of political and moral authority that would shape Melville’s narrative. The limits of that authority were tested not only in Kansas but also in Cuba, where Americans attempted to seize power before the island was “Africanized” by revolutionary slaves. Adverting to his own origin story in Amasa Delano’s account of the slave revolt aboard the Tryal, Melville used the conflicting claims surrounding these badlands to convey a devastating portrait—less allegorical than actual—of the American polity at mid-century. Well before Preston Brooks’s attack on Charles Sumner in 1856, it had become clear to Melville that American governance had devolved into a violent state of exception, one in which political claims, like checks and balances, had lost their meaning. If “Benito Cereno” presents a political allegory, it is much closer to Benjamin’s corrosive free-for-all in which sense itself dissolves, the claims of slaves and sovereigns upending each other precisely as paper wars made agreement on Kansas or Cuba impossible. But in that violent clash of ideas, soon to incite a clash of arms, Melville perceived a fragile, ironic unity, a fleeting glimpse of stark coalition that revealed the true limits of American sovereignty. * * * In broad outline, the seven-year contest over the admission of Kansas to the Union, extending from January 4, 1854, when the Senate Committee on Territories reported a motion to allow the “Nebraska” territory to apply for statehood, through admission on January 29, 1861, barely two months from the outbreak of war, became an emblem of political impasse.10

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Franklin Pierce appointed a territorial governor, initiating the process of adopting a state constitution, installing local governance, and formally applying for statehood. Almost immediately, the process went awry. In Washington, legislators clashed over the abrogation of the Missouri Compromise line and the direction of popular sovereignty, struggling to find common ground, or any ground, that would allow them to extend Clay’s settlement. But events in the territory, unburdened by political abstraction, decisively intervened. To combat a land rush by proslavery Missourians, Amos Lawrence and other free soilers quickly organized the New England Emigrant Aid Company, funding transportation, resettlement, and, opponents charged, weaponry for antislavery settlers. Not one, but two constitutions were initially written and adopted, a free-state version drafted in Topeka in 1855, and a proslavery rejoinder framed in Lecompton two years later. Neither became law. Both sides fielded networks of local and regional guardians, who, along with the U.S.  Army stationed at Leavenworth, proved themselves incapable of stemming violence or imposing order. Territorial governors came and went—a total of ten during the seven-year period. As Paul Gates demonstrates, the problem was less ideology than land: Kansas comprised the most encumbered and worst administered territory in U.S. history. A patchwork of Native American stakeholders, displaced from the East, owned much of the southeast region initially most attractive to settlers, none of which could be rescinded without survey and formal sale. Yet government administration lagged, and there was no adequate policing of squatters. The result was a free-for-all that occasionally gave way to spectacular violence, as in John Brown’s massacre of five claimants at Pottawatomie Creek, or Sheriff Samuel Jones’s attack on the free-state settlement at Lawrence. “We have never witnessed … such violence of temper and language—such fanaticism, such madness,” declared the Richmond Whig in 1854.11 Although most of these events took place well after “Benito Cereno” appeared in Putnam’s Magazine in late 1855, their course could already be discerned in accounts Melville read daily in local newspapers compelled to take sides, and would be fully manifest by the time The Piazza Tales was published. To shrewd observers, the state of exception in Kansas was a register of the clashing sovereignties that had marked America’s civil life since the Founding. The San Dominick would become a test of those grounding assumptions. Despite the provisional nature of Benjamin’s “Critique of Violence”— the essay, as I argued in Chap. 2, had not yet moved beyond an ideal, or

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“divine” resolution to states of exception—Benjamin’s dialectic of natural and positive law seems to characterize the impasse over Kansas. Benjamin, it will be recalled, saw coercion as an inherent attribute of natural law, for which the disciplinary violence of positive law served as a disruptive antidote. Among antebellum Americans’ presumed natural rights was an almost boundless claim to self-possession through the ownership of private property12; yet positive law, acting to secure property, denied the universal tenor of self-possession by endorsing slavery. Any attempt to resolve the conflict met with the moral absolutism of local governance, sharpened to a menacing edge by Southern spokesmen. “There is a higher law, but it is the law of nature,” declared North Carolina Congressman Thomas Clingman. “When God Almighty implants his characteristics upon natural objects, man cannot change them.” Meddling with the ordained inferiority of subject people would produce “nothing but mischief.”13 “The right to hold property,” argued George Seward of Georgia, “is contemporaneous with the early condition of man, and … laid the foundation for the necessity of government.” Lewis Cass, one of the most subtle and searching advocates for Henry Clay’s vanishing middle ground, was equally scrupulous. “[W]e cannot touch their domestic hearths, nor their domestic altars,” he said of the South, “their man servants nor their maid servants, their houses, their farms, nor their property, without a gross violation of the inalienable rights of man” (279). Northern spokesmen insisted on the countervailing coercion of positive law. Property rights were conditional, declared Maine Representative E. Wilder Farley. “Has not Congress as clearly the right to legislate upon slavery in the Territories … as it possessed to pass an embargo or non-intercourse act?” If the matter of slavery is inviolate, Farley declared, then Kansas itself is “in a state of anarchy” (679). American slavery thus encapsulated Benjamin’s stark assertion that institutional violence echoed and extended the sovereign violence of natural law. To many congressmen, slavery represented the coercion that made freedom possible. The severe ambiguities of natural right in a slave system—ambiguities that, as Robert Cover has demonstrated, preoccupied antebellum jurists— evoked a number of responses from lawmakers attempting to preserve Clay’s final settlement.14 One response followed Seward’s lead to search for an original and unshakable premise that would still the controversy. Two candidates emerged—both, as it turned out, equally flawed: the “people” and “sovereignty.” The preamble to the Constitution vests political power squarely with the people, who have the authority to alter or

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abolish law or government as they see fit. The abstract nature of the term, with its gestures to natural law, establishes an unlimited political claim absolutely prior to all positive law. Hence, John Weller, of California, argued that “the people, the original source of all power, … who spoke this Government into existence” (200), should determine local as well as national policy. The “laws of God,” Cass maintained, conferred divine agency on the entire community, which ought “to establish a government for themselves” (231). Yet the divinity of common power hardly settled matters in Kansas, since, as Mississippi Senator Albert Brown insisted, slavery, too, is of “divine origin” (230). Limiting the people to white property holders could not address the prior claims of natural right, even when, as proslavery advocates maintained, slavery established the republican attributes of the people themselves. Slavery, Brown declared, “equalizes white men, puts them on a level with one another,” and thereby “represses … the evil passions” that “drive men to madness.” The slaveholding states thus provide “a living, breathing exemplification of the beautiful sentiment, that all men are equal” (230). The people’s performative speech, like the Senator’s noble words, creates the very conditions for democratic power and its abuses. A second claim to origins, more central to the Kansas debate, involved the nature of sovereignty. The ambiguities of federalism, with its competing centers of authority, rendered Stephen Douglas’s doctrine of squatter sovereignty a kind of black hole into which all claims of priority and power collapsed and disappeared. Because, as New  York Congressman John Taylor asserted, the word “sovereignty … never had … any very precise and definite meaning” (595), it could be bent in any direction. If Congress had the power to establish territories, did that right negate a prior claim to sovereignty by settlers? Spokesmen fell into predictable lines. Sovereignty, claimed Virginia’s William Goode, means “[f]reedom from control—freedom from responsibility—supremacy. Sovereignty is the supreme, uncontrollable will of society” (907). “Whenever … it may be proper for the people … to enact a law with regard to their domestic relations,” declared fellow Democrat Isaac Toucey, it is an exercise of their “inherent, ungranted, sovereign right” (316). Others argued that the very opacity of the term promoted confusion. “I do not believe in crushing human liberty to the earth by a kind of abstract mystical attribute,” Cass declared, “even if you call it SOVEREIGNTY, which, under our Government is a mere assumption, the word itself not being in the Constitution” (271). The federal government’s limited powers excluded that assumption. Yet the

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recourse to positive liberty deployed by advocates of popular sovereignty to deflect the claims of federal preeminence could be easily turned aside. Territories were unformed, inchoate, not vested with political power but dependent—no more capable, claimed Thomas Eliot of Massachusetts, than “the infant within our homes” (577). If sovereignty is determinative, argued North Carolina Congressman Sion Rogers, then a single settler, like God himself, could establish priority in a district or territory and impose “fundamental law for all time to come” (CG 33:2, App., 174). Absent that divine power, no authority, federal or territorial, could hold sway. Sovereignty, it seemed, could be asserted but not owned. As facts on the ground would soon prove, however, popular sovereignty in practice was so compromised that it settled almost nothing. Initial attempts to elect state legislators were rigged, as a House investigation subsequently documented in exhaustive detail. Antislavery voters were intimidated, or their votes were discarded; free state election districts were invaded, balloting broken up. Proslavery interlopers poured across the Missouri border to cast furtive votes before going back home. “[E]very election has been controlled, not by the actual settlers,” the Special Committee concluded, “but by citizens of Missouri.”15 But corrupt polling was only a symptom of a broader ambiguity involving the squatting associated with squatter sovereignty. To establish a claim, all a new settler need to do was to lay four logs for a foundation and improve the lot within thirty days, but the timetable was frequently ignored or abused by large speculators who had no intention of settling. Subsequent claimants could easily supersede such absentees, obliterating traces of original occupancy and restively awaiting a land office to validate their stake. Land was routinely stolen from Native American occupants, still the rightful owners and many not willing to sell. Most of the violence, as Dale Watts demonstrates, was provoked by this scattershot ownership.16 Not possession but domination—the appropriating violence that Benjamin associated with the claims of knowledge or power—often marked the material conditions of squatter sovereignty. To assume a claim was both to assert presence in the territory and to make a political argument. Hence the months-long wrangling over Kansas in Congress was equally an attempt at rational discourse and a confession of its impotence. The ornate and labored speeches in which congressmen attempted to serve their constituents and appear as statesmen sank beneath their own weight, as if the Kansas earth had engulfed the flimsy foundations of all its settlers. In Washington, law and lawlessness converged.

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One labored paragraph, section 14, dominated debate on the Territorial Act. In barely intelligible legalese, reflecting every scruple and contingency preoccupying Congress, the compromise measure mandated that “the Constitution, and all Laws of the United States which are not locally inapplicable, shall have the same force and effect” in Kansas as in the country at large. The double negative here is significant, suggesting a vague middle ground between agreement and dissent. Statutes beyond the Constitution, including the Missouri legislation of 1820, “being inconsistent with the principle of non-intervention,” were declared “inoperative and void”—the inherent rights of property secured from the meddling of Congress. Kansas inhabitants were thus “perfectly free to form and regulate their domestic institutions in their own way, subject only to the Constitution,” which, in three clauses (Article 1, sections 2 and 9, and Article 4, section 2), acknowledged the existence of slavery without explicitly endorsing it. The careful balancing act ended with a blanket guarantee, that abrogation of the Missouri Compromise would not leave a legal limbo permitting free state advocates “to revive or put in force any law or regulation which may have existed” in the region’s Spanish or French prehistory, complicating claims.17 Kansas land was thus rendered what Mississippian Wiley Harris called a “tabula rasa”—a region from which history was expunged. The territory, Tennesseean Nathaniel Taylor declared, was a “blank sheet” (CG 33:1, App., 547, 815) on which politicians or artists could imagine a rejuvenated order. It was a literal empty place. But if history could be suppressed, it could not be entirely nullified, asserting its stubborn presence in discursive formations that poked through rival claims like limestone through Kansas land. The demand to settle the violent dialectic between property and freedom produced a characteristic trope expressing both evasion and denial. The doctrine of non-­intervention, the presumption that not claiming something was somehow performative, exposed lawmakers’ contortions as absurdities. “[F]rom the experience which the southern States have had of the tendencies of Congress … on the subject of slavery,” maintained Senator James Mason of Virginia, employing the signature double negative, “I do not know that we may not quite as safely trust the people, come from where they may” (CG 33:1, App., 774). That the people may come from regions far removed from Southern sympathies was a risk that men like Mason felt compelled to take as the threat of disunion intensified. For John Taylor, of New York, such formulations revealed the severe challenges of compromise. “[N]obody

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denies that a State has the entire control of the institution of slavery within her limits,” he declared, so that any imposition by Congress could be dissolved: The objection was not to her coming in, but to her coming in without a prohibition of slavery in her constitution—a prohibition … Congress could not control an instant after it became operative. What right then had Congress to say it should be in … what right to say she should not come in without it? (594)

The double negatives here do more than mark out a delicate balancing of alternatives; they are the verbal equivalent of a tabula rasa that would admit and exclude all prior assumptions, a testament to the force of a political order that had to be suspended—so advocates argued—for order to be preserved. The figure, in short, as Melville would acerbically recognize throughout “Benito Cereno,” was the imprint of a normative failure, of a national state of exception. A cynical novelist observing the near anarchy that descended on Kansas after the passage of the Territorial Act in 1854 might be forgiven for imagining that the chaos was merely the local effect of a presiding and dangerous disease. The combined influence of an intention both to declare old law “inoperative and void” and to erase America’s most sinister contradiction must have seemed to Melville as blatant a warning sign as that of his father-in-law, Lemuel Shaw, ducking beneath the chains protecting his courthouse from antislavery activists protesting the rendition of Thomas Sims—or, for that matter, as sinister as a mutinous slave ship adrift in the Pacific. Denial or erasure only magnified the drift. Where and how could a region or a people be divorced from its historical conditions and crimes? Was it reasonable, as John Taylor claimed, to assert that “this territory came to us a wilderness,” that there were no “‘laws, usages, or municipal regulations in force’ … no rights of property or other rights to protect— no inhabitants to protect their rights”? Kansas, Taylor concluded, “was within the exception to the rule in respect to uninhabited territory” (594). This denial of circumstance imagines a kind of hushed expectancy, as if an unformed Earth awaited the imprint of the Almighty hand. But the form descending on this void, the imprint of slavery and subjection already evident in the disposition of Native tribes, suggested that exception had severe consequences that a polity could not entirely regulate or control. Kansas, claimed Rhode Island Democrat Thomas Davis, an opponent of

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non-intervention, has nothing to do with slavery; “It does not exist there now by any law, custom, or institution … The matter comes to us clear of all entanglements … to allow the institution of slavery a license” (637). But the depth of the controversy and the catastrophic implementation of the Kansas-Nebraska Act suggest that the matter was not easily resolved. The state of exception would soon impose its will on the nation at large. The principal sign of this impasse lies in the impossibility, throughout the controversy, to make legitimate claims. Since there was no common ground, no enduring resolution was possible. In that regard, the legal and moral difficulties in Kansas merged with Congressional rhetoric to yield a kind of global exception, a representation of nullity. One can hear that intellectual void in the intricate, self-referential attempts by lawmakers to fix shifting principles. “If, in the presentation of a just claim … the South had originated this measure,” asserted Virginia’s William Goode, “she would have been justified by the moral sense of the civilized world” (CG 33:1, App., 903). But the region has not been a claimant at all, Goode insisted, and thus “incurred no responsibility” for any failures of policy. Abolitionists make their case “not by any process of ratiocination,” he argued, but “claim it as a species of postulate” established through shallow “testimony,” devoid of evidence (904). Dictating to the South, maintained Mississippi Democrat William Barry, is merely the exploded claim of an overreaching Congress, a figure that “perished” through the assumption of settled Constitutional law (613). Opponents disagreed. Pennsylvania Whig Isaac Hiester flatly stated that territories were not sovereign, a status that could ultimately rest only in the “General Government” (518). New Yorker Gilbert Dean argued that the South’s “claim” to void the Missouri Compromise was as unjust as a brother who occupied land bequeathed to his sibling—a claim that “cannot now be substantiated” (829). Other spokesmen exposed the logical contradictions of non-­ intervention. If Southerners contend that slaveholders had an invincible right to transport property, asked New York congressman Davis Carpenter, how do they propose to enforce the Fugitive Slave Act in a territory not yet granted statehood? Should all their slaves escape in the absence of federal law, would masters be able to assert a claim of ownership (600)? Lewis Cass found similar flaws. Claims regarding a just “equality” of property, the common law assertion that possession is “the supreme law of the land,” are, in this instance, ironically contingent, since Congress cannot dictate state law (272). Hence, while Cass, a Democrat, supported popular sovereignty, he argued that the measure might well weaken the South. The

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most assertive claim to private property could not defy local law. Massachusetts Know-Nothing Nathaniel Banks offered a scathing denunciation of Southern pretension. Since the law of nations and nature declares the seizure of slaves an act of “piracy,” the “claim” that property in humans is “invested with attributes of universality” is not only fallacious but criminal. To impose slavery on Kansas would make the flag itself an instrument of torture, “as if the lashes of one were the stripes of the other, and every wave of the starry ensign were accompanied by the clanking of coffles and chains” (879). Representation turned murderous under this murderous regime. Like Kansas, Cuba became a battleground for these warring imperatives. While Cuba did not pose the immediate threat conveyed by Kansas, the menace and disposition of its African inhabitants may well have had a more visceral influence on Melville’s tale of slave revolt. The struggle over slavery in Kansas, as Nicole Etcheson demonstrates, was less concerned with forced labor than with free choice, the rights of claimants to avoid “white” slavery by punitive territorial law.18 In Cuba, the problem was slaves themselves. Since his inauguration, doughface Franklin Pierce had sought ways to promote Southern expansion by authorizing his minister to Spain, Pierre Soulé, to attempt acquisition of the island through purchase, diplomacy, invasion, or a combination of all three. As the conflict over Kansas intensified, American claims on Cuba became equally strained. Reformist Captain-General Juan de la Pezuela seemed determined to honor British demands to curb Cuban slaveholding by freeing so-called emancipados, slaves covertly imported after British emancipation in the Caribbean.19 The moves led to hysterical charges in the United States that the sinister triad of England, Spain, and France was plotting to “Africanize” Cuba, rendering its forced laborers so assertive that no Southerner would dare intervene. “[T]o Africanize Cuba,” declared Louisiana Senator John Slidell in a bid to force annexation, “plainly conveys … the complex ideas of emancipation, confiscation, pillage, murder, devastation, and barbarism” (CG 33:1, vol. 2, 1021). A Louisiana resolution introduced in Congress dreaded a Cuba “administered by an inferior and barbarous African race … adverse to the pure American influence” of white supremacy (1021). In late February 1854, Pezuela seemed to validate Cuban defiance by seizing the American vessel Black Warrior when it called in Havana, holding it for over two weeks and sparking renewed demands for action. In response, Soulé and others eventually produced the so-called Ostend Manifesto warning that although America would honor its

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neutrality laws, “should the Cubans themselves rise in revolt against the oppression which they suffer, no human power could prevent the citizens of the United States … from rushing to their assistance.”20 The heroic revolutionaries, of course, were the slaveholders, not the slaves. Filibustering General John Quitman, Mexican War veteran and Pierce confidant, had long been awaiting such a call, but by the time he made his play, through a coup attempt by Cuban centrists that was thwarted in late February 1855, the political uproar over the Ostend document had doomed all expedients, as Democrats took a beating at the polls. Alarm over Africanization subsided, and Southern dreams of expansion turned elsewhere. Local newspapers widely covered both stories during the period when Melville wrote “Benito Cereno” and saw it through publication. Excerpts from Slidell’s speech urging the end of American neutrality in Cuba appeared in the Pittsfield Sun shortly after it was reported in the Congressional Globe.21 Three months later, the Springfield Daily Republican carried Pierce’s address to Congress, in which he warned that if “the amicable adjustment of our difficulties with Spain should … fail,” he would use all “authority,” short of outright invasion, “to insure the observance of our just rights” (August 8, 1854). In early March 1855, the Whig Republican loudly denounced the Ostend Manifesto as a “shameles[s]” attempt “to render slavery in the southern states safe, permanent and profitable” (March 8, 1855). When Melville visited New York on business in April 1855, he probably followed the New York Herald’s breathless coverage of Ramón Pintó’s failed coup, with its denunciation of American “pirates” (April 2, 1855) waiting offshore to pounce. Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, to which Melville subscribed, offered monthly reports on Pezuela, the Black Warrior, and the “African” threat.22 Such accounts undoubtedly merged in Melville’s mind with the drumbeat of stories on Kansas. The Republican dutifully covered every “anti-Nebraska” meeting in the region, and ran letters from free-state settlers in “Kanzas” (e.g., March 8, 1855) funded by the Emigrant Aid Company. Kansas, noted one correspondent, is the “geographical center” of the nation, the true north of its effort to contain the “blight of slavery” and the “polar star of the most brilliant and mighty constellation of states that sun ever shone upon” (September 2, 1854). Border ruffians, it was reported, routinely subjected settlers to a villainous “system of surveillance” intended to stamp out the free-state “disease” (September 26, 1854), an outrage that demanded relentless resistance. The Democratic Pittsfield Sun, a supporter of popular

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sovereignty, published the Kansas-Nebraska Act in its entirety in early June 1854, and ran excerpts from Senate testimony, including the ruminations of Lewis Cass and a prickly letter by Stephen Douglas himself denying that popular sovereignty was a bid “to establish slavery in the Territories” (June 8, 1854; March 2, 1854). The Sun also gave extensive play to a document with over 3000 signatures, the “Protest of New England Clergymen,” targeting the conciliatory Massachusetts junior senator Edward Everett and soon driving him from office. Any nod to the slave power, the ministers claimed, however veiled in republican rhetoric, was “a measure full of danger to the peace, and even the existence, of our beloved Union, and exposing us to the righteous judgments of the Almighty” (March 23, 1854). Yet most proper Whigs stopped well short of such radical denunciation. The “Anti-Nebraska Convention at Worcester,” declared Republican editor Samuel Bowles, was “narrow-­ minded and obnoxious,” yet another outbreak of the epidemic political disease threatening to overwhelm the nation (July 21, 1854). By late 1854, evidence of the nation’s political infection had become inescapable, and Melville, deeply attentive to its symptoms, sought an equally radical cure. * * * “Benito Cereno” is arguably the most penetrating political fiction Melville ever wrote. Unlike the great moral allegories Moby Dick and Billy Budd, or the more narrowly focused protests of White Jacket and Typee, “Benito Cereno” sharply but subtly intervenes in the nation’s defining contest. Yet by reaching back a generation to the story of an obscure merchant captain, Melville is also signaling an aesthetic distance from the controversy—or, to put the matter more saliently—he explores the true grounds of the competing claims on slavery through the nature of its representations. Like Benjamin, Melville imagines representation as a center of potentially explosive force, in which the pressures of uniformity and concentration asserted by the symbolic axis of language collide with the metonymic dispersions of allegory. Those collisions are intensified by the state of exception aboard the San Dominick, where organizing scenes are constantly menaced by a volatile staging that impels Amasa Delano to imagine dubious alternates. In Melville’s account of the slave mutiny, these displacements are literal: almost everything Delano encounters on the San Dominick is a kind of altered reality, an “as if” in which Melville can

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scrutinize political positions like pieces on a chessboard, each move complicating and deepening the contest. And although Delano, racist republican, often seems little more than a dupe overmastered by his African antagonists, he adopts a surprisingly ethical role. It is Delano who internalizes the endless double negatives of the slavery debate, continually interrogating the nature, appearance, and efficacy of sovereignty, just as it is Delano who embodies the most disturbing attributes of that debate. But whereas the American captain can offer little more than Christian quietism to resolve the conflict, Melville’s own stagings do more. By imagining the entire encounter as a series of gestures, postures, and self-conscious attitudes, Melville summons a polity at once wracked by violence and capable, at rare moments, of mastering it. Sovereignty, for Melville, is not the will to power, but the power to expose the deepest sources of the political will. The political dissonance in Kansas and Cuba, like the studies in tyranny that had preoccupied him in virtually all his fictions of the sea, prompted Melville to take a decisive turn. In “Benito Cereno,” Melville recognized, as did Benjamin confronting a similar collapse of order, that crises of sovereignty were intimately linked to ruptures in representation. Benjamin’s critical opus amounted to a rejection of the sovereign self; for him, states of exception revealed the brutal mechanics of power operating through a web of illusions that Benjamin associated with reification. In destroying such illusions, states of exception provided a literal origin story, a creation myth in which the invisible hand was not a benign law giver but an object world masquerading as submissive and tractable. On the San Dominick, mutiny and murder shatter that masquerade. By aligning his narrative with Amasa Delano’s stumbling reflections, Melville puts us at the unstable meeting ground of sovereignty and a mutinous plenum. Surrounded by insurgent slaves whom he takes to be no more troublesome than crates or bales, Delano restlessly attempts to stand firm. Yet the actors on the San Dominick are in constant motion, almost continuously changing position or attitude as they jockey for advantage. In Melville’s spatial depiction of sovereignty, these attitudes constitute both political and aesthetic claims. The real story of the San Dominick, then, involves neither the revelation of the mutiny nor the designs of the opponents, but a matrix in which beliefs and objects, bodily positions and violent disruption create a menacing global structure. Melville’s radical engagement with Kansas and Cuba attempts to make mutiny itself the ground of American order. Eric Sundquist has plausibly argued that Melville’s backdating of the Tryal incident from Delano’s 1805 to 1799 underscores its links with the

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St. Domingue rebellion. In his own account, Delano never mentions the revolt, but is more immediately concerned with establishing his rectitude in the face of the real Cereno’s subversive claims. Far from being a grateful, ruined invalid, Delano asserts, Cereno attempted to “injure my character” by spreading scandalous gossip derived from rogue sailors whom Delano had imprisoned, an attack that might have spared Cereno from providing a generous reward.23 “Amongst other atrocities,” the injured Delano charges, these convicts “swore I was a pirate”—this despite his returning “a bag of doubloons, … several bags of dollars, … and several baskets of watches, some gold, and some silver” (329) to the liberated Spaniard. The lengthy deposition appended to the original narrative and imported wholesale into Melville’s account is thus an urgent counterweight to the charge of piracy, and to the related, more contentious charge of privateering. In his own claim concerning the encounter—evidence that may not have been available to Melville—Cereno contended that, by the Treaty of San Lorenzo el Réal (1795), ships or merchandise recovered from “pirates” had to be “handed over to the officials … at the port who will … return them to their rightful owner.”24 Delano asserted that Cereno had promised him half the merchandise—or, as Melville phrased it, the ship, being “as good as lost … no small part should be theirs.”25 The authentication of the uprising in the original deposition was thus the legal basis for a potential counter-suit, had it been pursued, establishing that Delano engaged in a police action rescuing a vessel in which a slave revolt had canceled Cereno’s claim of ownership, and that Delano, as Judge Advocate Juan de Rozas recorded, had a right to “ten thousand dollars” in compensation (Stuckey 284). As a contemporary Spanish legal judgment asserted, “he who has exposed his liberty, his fortune, and even his life, to recover … goods … taken by the enemy, ought to be allowed … to keep them, as a just compensation for the dangers and the expenditure which he has incurred.”26 The fact that Delano settled for much less underscores his self-pitying assertion that he has experienced “misery and ingratitude … from the very persons to whom I have rendered the greatest services” (Narrative 331). The Spanish crew may well have suffered, but Delano suffered more. The restitution of Delano’s expenses by the Lima Audiencia, however, was not merely a vindication of the American’s rectitude; it represented a pointed assertion of Spanish sovereignty when maritime conduct had become a focus of state power. As Janice Thomson has argued, the long shift from medieval heteronomy to nineteenth-century nationalism

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hinged, in part, on distinguishing privateering from piracy. Since most states, including Spain, promoted privateering throughout the long eighteenth century, maritime courts were compelled to parse licit and illicit activities. Freebooters and mutineers were pirates; state-sanctioned raiders were patriotic entrepreneurs.27 In the emerging “search for sovereignty,” as Lauren Benton puts it, the sea became a kind of no-man’s land penetrated by conflicting territorial claims, with the disposition of captured property standing in for state power.28 How and where violence could operate, Thomson argues, thus became a measure of sovereignty itself, the appropriation of goods standing in for the dominance and disposition of subjects. James Reddie, in a review of contemporary Spanish maritime law, argued that “re-capture from pirates” had the same legal standing as “re-­ capture from the enemy” (261), suggesting how lawful violence enhanced state authority. In an era before Spain had suppressed its own slave trade, the recapture of the Tryal was thus a register of both Spain’s moral probity and its imperial resolve. Through this admixture of natural and positive law—the violent claims of possession overlain by the police actions of the state—Melville recognized a shrewd metaphor for America’s own crisis of sovereignty. From one standpoint, the San Dominick represented a Lockean revolutionary state in which political actors, to secure property in themselves, had thrown off their oppressors and established a genuine compact, whereby Cereno “obliged himself to carry [the Africans] to Senegal, and they not to kill any more, and he formally made over to them the ship, with the cargo” (108). The enforced transaction was both a deed and a dower, investing liberated subjects with the means to assert their will. But this gesture to natural law is shadowed by its illicit double, the menace of piracy that Delano immediately sensed in recognizing that the ship flew no colors, and in his recurrent accesses of terror when he feels threatened by the Africans. Only Delano’s ironic conviction that Cereno, not the Africans, must be the pirate—although his weakened ship and famished crew posed little danger and the connivance of Africans seemed unfathomable—prevents him from perceiving the truth; and only after he disarms Babo at the story’s climax does he recognize that the Africans themselves are in “ferocious piratical revolt” (99). Yet the distinction between licit and illicit property remains unstable, even after that revelation. The leader Delano chooses for the counter-assault to retake the San Dominick is an old “privateer’s man,” reputedly a “pirate” (101), who responds to Delano’s promised reward by reanimating old skills. Asserting a privateer’s

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rights over a pirated ship would reestablish legitimate sovereignty and return the Africans to their status as chattel, thus restoring Lockean order, the rule of men over things. Ownership constituted authority. Yet, as maritime law suggested, the “lonely” spot where Delano first sighted the slave ship was effectively empty, a contested space, infrequently policed, and subject to the conflicting claims of “lawless” freebooters seeking sanctuary. As Delano boards the San Dominick, the narrator underscores that moral and legal ambiguity. Encountering a strange ship and crew in the open sea has “something of the effect of enchantment. The ship seems unreal; these strange costumes, gestures, and faces, but a shadowy tableau just emerged from the deep, which directly must receive back what it gave” (50). The passage does more than anticipate Delano’s dreamy deliberations; it evokes the legal suspension imposed by what Jennifer Gaynor calls the “offing.” Piracy, Gaynor argues, is a flexible term that allows for the assertion of “multiple claimants to political authority” by imagining the ocean as a transactional space furrowed by the effects of “deixis”—of position, gesture, and time.29 Piracy, in these terms, is not merely a menace to authority but a performative tactic, an enactment of sovereignty against counteractions and claims—an attempt, in Mouffe and Laclau’s terms, to establish hegemony. One state’s piracy is another state’s self-promotion.30 Piracy, in these terms, is an enterprise that tests, measures, and defines legitimacy. Delano’s dream state corresponds to Gaynor’s offing, a zone in which all authority is thrown into exception. That ambiguity includes moral authority. As Daniel Heller-Roazen argues, the classical definition of the pirate as “the enemy of all” denotes not only the boundaries of law but also its inherent violence. Since pirates occupy no civil order but live at the limits of authority, they have foresworn all the obligations attending civility, so that any attempt to discipline them cannot be framed in normative terms. “In speaking to a pirate, in dealing with a pirate, no matter one’s acts, no matter one’s word, and no matter one’s faith,” Heller-Roazen maintains, “one cannot fail to don a mask” alien to civility. “[O]ne becomes a pirate oneself.”31 More than a challenge to law, piracy is a tabula rasa, the violent, empty place that makes law meaningful. * * * Melville’s text performs these ambiguities of deixis and moral posture by incorporating key elements of the Kansas debate signifying a more general crisis of representation. As any attentive reader knows, the text is awash in

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double negatives. Delano’s character, we are informed at the outset, sustained “a singularly undistrustful good nature” (47), one whose generosity was “not without … effect” on the beleaguered Cereno (58), and who savored Babo’s dutiful attendance “not without humane satisfaction” (52). Accosting Cereno, the American “was not a little concerned at what he could not help taking for the time to be Don Benito’s unfriendly indifference” (52), and found him “not unlike” the chastened Charles V, the dread but sickly sovereign (53). The American engages in tortuous internal debates regarding the hidden intentions of the elusive captives and crew, as if reflection alone would settle the matter. In one extended siege of thought, Delano imagines Cereno a lunatic, an impostor, a “low-born adventurer,” a “boor,” a “young knave of talent and spirit,” a trickster, a predatory beast, and “a true hidalgo” (64–65). “[W]as it not absurd to think [that] … a vessel in distress,” he later reflects, “…should … be of a piratical character”? “But then,” he imagines, “might not general distress … be affected?” Malay pirates often lured victims through such tactics; “Not that Captain Delano had entirely credited such things,” but “might not the San Dominick, like a slumbering volcano,” suddenly explode (68)? Such intellectual tacking, like the lucubrations of Kansas antagonists, does little to establish primacy or the truth but underscores contingency, the dependence of values on material conditions, allegory over symbol. Thought is but another species of exception. Delano’s dialectical accesses are conventionally read as evidence of his guilelessness and imbecility. “[K]not in hand, and knot in head” (76)— another double negative—he wanders through the day lost in mazes, imprisoned by his racism and indecision. The invocation of piracy, however, applied in the Kansas debates to threats against property or natural right, suggests the moral earnestness of Delano’s attitude. If he is a wise fool—his wisdom indicated by his fund of nautical knowledge—he is also a kind of sophist charged with the impossible task of sorting through the political contentions of his era amid conditions that suspend discourse itself. It is as if he were a Solomonic governor attempting to bring order to a wilderness in which all claims are invalidated, or to establish sovereignty in an offing where reason and authority are fluid and all too easily submerged. As Gaynor argues, in such a milieu, position and gesture are more potent than discursive or legal thought, just as the Kansas controversy was driven more decisively by staked claims than by strict sense. In fictions like Mardi and Moby Dick, as well as in late pieces like “Bartleby” and “The Encantadas,” Melville used gesture and movement to assess

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moral and social positions—think of Taji’s excursion, Ahab’s mad pursuit, or Bartleby’s draping himself on a banister. In “Benito Cereno,” Melville hones that convention to a fine edge. As the San Dominick drifts, its occupants are in constant motion, crowding around their rescuer when he boards, following or surveilling him as he seeks out the captain, gesturing and signaling to him as he makes his way about. A conference with Cereno on the main deck reconvenes on the poop, then in the cuddy, astern to the captain’s privileged area, and forward to distribute food. Babo constantly draws Cereno aside to plot his next move or disappears with his captive, whereupon Delano moves about from gallery to midship, taking the measure of the vessel, its occupants, and their designs. Toward the end of the narrative Delano makes two round trips from the captain’s cabin to the quarterdeck to pilot the ship into harbor and report on its progress. And when the American crew retakes the San Dominick, they board as if in the saddle, “one leg sideways flung over the bulwarks,” suspended yet secured (102). Like Delano himself, the fighters seek firm footing in a shifting and treacherous domain. That these transits are not merely stage devices to simulate dynamism in a confined space, as when an actor in a police drama paces around the interrogation table, may be seen in two diametrical scenes—Atufal’s audience with Cereno and Delano’s near tumble into the sea. In the first, Atufal is summoned to mask Cereno’s confusion—the captain fainting into the arms of Babo, who has the ship’s bell struck to distract from the seizure. As Atufal mounts the steps to the poop, raising his arms in defiant supplication, the conversation turns to Cereno’s mock punishment of the giant, who has supposedly reappeared in judgment every two hours for the past two months—an absurd distortion of time. Atufal’s metronomic movement is thus a testament to Cereno’s fierce discipline, yet it is also the occasion for treachery in the ostensibly reserved Babo’s offering his most extended commentary: “those slits in Atufal’s ears once held wedges of gold; but poor Babo here, in his own land, was only a poor slave; a black man’s slave was Babo, who now is the white’s” (62). Delano objects to this familiarity, glancing at master and man as if to challenge Babo’s temerity, but the slave’s talking out of turn is countermanded by Atufal’s silent departure. The mutineers thus orbit in a kind of solar system displaying titular power through amplitude—Cereno at the top of the stairs—yet aggressive authority through the disposition of bodies—Atufal’s towering integrity, Babo’s cradling Cereno and his intrusion during the interview. Despite Delano’s assumptions of power, it is Atufal and Babo who rise up, Cereno who is cast down.

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Delano’s brief visit astern is even more intricate. Left once again alone— Cereno and Babo had now gone “below”—he mounts to a gallery to look for his returning crew. There he falls into a revery. The tarred dead lights, resembling sarcophagi, resurrect the grand ship’s former, privileged passengers, and the trailing sea appears a manicured garden marked by “long formal alleys … crossing … terraces of swells” (74). Under their spell, the ruined vantage suddenly seems a summer house, and Delano an inland traveler, “like … one who alone on the prairie feels unrest from the repose of the noon” (74). Glancing down, he glimpses a Spaniard attempting to signal him, and the renewed puzzle causes Delano to lose his grasp and nearly tumble overboard. The accident, in turn, arouses an African monitor above, looking down “[w]ith sober curiosity” (75), as the sailor now fixes Delano from behind a porthole. The incident is a study in relativity, a distortion of space-time in which positions, objects, and subjects are involved in continuous displacement and substitution. As Delano surveys the offing, the ground literally shifts, rendering the ocean a kind of ruined domestic space reflecting the rotting vessel. At the center of the collective gaze, Delano is not only the focus of scrutiny but also the sovereign presence charged with ordering these images, yet the scene deliberately transposes him by forcing us to imagine the viewer through the distorted or partial gazes of others. As the African looks down, he seems to degrade the American captain in the ruined Spanish sphere to which the Spanish sailor, looking up, seeks to restore him. Power here dissolves into an uneasy play of mutual illusions, its shifting claims no more stable than the phantom fields of the sea. Gestures, too, reveal ephemeral claims to authority. Although both Delano and Babo “understan[d] … the Spanish,” as the deposition puts it (110), the terror and tension aboard the San Dominick often force actors to communicate by other means. Their silent vocabulary marks another borderland that Delano desperately tries to police, the boundary, as Benjamin would argue, between barbarism and civility. If to suppress piracy is to become piratical, then only a fool or a saint would attempt to enforce the law; in that legal limbo, Melville suggests, order depends on the disposition and suppression of bodies. Transactions on the San Dominick are often marked by exaggerated, almost comic ceremony. As they make their way to the poop, his host invites Delano, with deep and solemn “Castilian bows” (59), to ascend a ladder within arm’s length of the hatchet polishers. That gesture is echoed by the murderous Francesco, whose “continual smiles and bows” (88) usher the captains to their lunch.

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So, too, Babo’s elaborate courtesies to Cereno mock the master’s supposed norms, as if, dressed in the bare remnants of an old sail, the servant exposes the ruinous and richly dressed sovereign. Cereno is the natural focus of such hypocrisy. His efforts to maintain self-control in the face of terror turn courtesy into satire, and induce in Delano endless meditations on his host’s misconduct. The Spaniard twitches his beard and bites his lips, makes plunging motions as if leaping into the sea, wrings his hands and glances wildly around. In a final parody of courtesy before he jumps overboard, he clutches Delano’s hand so fervently that the two seem a Janus of civility and terror, an amalgam forecast in the mordantly comic shaving scene in which Babo, with meticulous venom, strops a razor on his bare palm. With one hand elevating the razor and the other “professionally” soaping his victim’s neck (85), Babo is the embodiment of murderous courtesy. Melville’s insistence on the global displacement of bodies and actions forces us to read “Benito Cereno” not as an attack on a particular position or attitude, but on all positions and attitudes. It is not merely wronged slaves or their racist masters that the text engages, but the field of relations that defines them, an order indistinguishable from mutiny. Melville’s most incisive attack on those relations involves the frame itself, the nature of perception determining not only Delano’s assumptions, but also potentially those of the narrator. Many of the text’s representations come to us by means of a dialectic that Michael Fried has termed absorption and theatricality, one that corresponds precisely to Lefort’s distinction between sense and staging. According to Fried, neoclassical and Romantic art increasingly incorporated images of the rapt viewer into the composition, modeling the critical and aesthetic attentiveness it attempted to evoke. To be absorbed was to be claimed by a sort of dreamlike identification with the object, imagining a fusion of viewer and scene. Absorption, according to Fried, vied with and attempted to supersede theatricality, the highly polished and self-conscious display of technique over substance, of finish over effect. Although Fried sees the two postures as conventional episodes in art history, there is equal reason to think of them as the dialectical attributes of representation itself—the contest between art’s performative power to summon a world and the sheer mechanics of that power, the critical and technical tools that bring about the imagined scene. Absorption stops time and fixes space, invests the present moment with ultimate meaning. Theatricality puts time and space in motion, exposing the contingent nature of craft. It is a short step from this binary to the dynamic

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political relation between the plenum and its resistant others, yet on the San Dominick, all are sovereign and resistant, all absorbed and staged. Through absorption we may imagine the slaveholder’s ideal of a perfect harmony between master and man, in theatricality the exposure of that stance as mere contingent form.32 So conceived, absorption and theatricality shape almost every aspect of Delano’s struggle to make meaning aboard the San Dominick. Throughout the narrative, Amasa Delano seems gripped by all he surveys. Looking through the fog and his telescope early on, he stares at a throng of “hazy … dark cowls” pacing the deck like “Black Friars” in a cloister on some lonely cliff (48). Here it is difficult to tell where the art of the narrator ends and Delano’s begins; both contribute to the hazy composition, almost allegorical in its tone and effects, yet at once canonical and subversive. Is it Delano or the narrator who imagines the Pyrenees, sinners or saints who wear the cowls?33 Delano is similarly struck by the elaborately costumed Cereno’s dependence on Babo, “the black upholding the white” in a timeless scene of beautiful “fidelity” (57). A labored meditation on Cereno’s criminality ends with an absorbed glance at the Spaniard’s profile, “whose clearness of cut … ennobled about the chin by the beard,” proved him the emblem of a “true hidalgo” (65). Often, Delano struggles to compose these scenes. A crewman concealed in the main-chains seems to bear a jewel and wear a linen shirt; Delano stares, attempting to fathom what he sees. Yet an African mother in the cave-like shelter of some rigging seems a portrait of naked nature, reassuring in its very savagery as if a vignette from Mungo Park’s travel narrative. Nowhere is this tendency more evident than in Delano’s final access of terror, when, angling past Atufal, he returns to the main deck, his rescue mission almost complete. Calmly now he surveys the “oakum-pickers” and hatchet polishers, themselves gravely absorbed and figuring in a greater “repose”: “the screened sun in the quiet camp of the west shining out like the mild light from Abraham’s tent” (96). Here nature conveys the sovereign order that Delano would impose on the dreamlike San Dominick, even though every element of his experience has suborned that desire. On the mutinous slaver, the quiet designs of nature seem menaced by the claims of natural law. With barbed precision, the mutineers labor at every turn to subvert Delano’s fervent faith with a parodic absorption of their own. Babo’s displays for Delano, intuitively giving him what he craves, amount to so many mises-en-scène—carefully staged testaments to allegedly timeless attributes

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and conditions. Cereno’s interview with Atufal allows Delano, in effect, to capture the African prince, who, with chain wound thrice around his body, serves as a kind of architectural figure, a “sculptured porte[r]” (92) representing subjection, even as the lock at his waist is a pretense. The shaving scene, with the docile slave terrorizing the cringing master draped in the Spanish flag, all but undermines Delano’s hackneyed pleasure in this domestic chore, even as Delano’s association of the “Negro” with castanets and pleasant tunes signals the activity’s artifice. Scenes of violence, too, betray hidden design. When Delano mildly threatens Africans who jostle him as he distributes water, the entire ship freezes, each African “suspended in his or her posture, exactly as the word had found them” (79), a picture of both docile quiescence and coiled menace. Cereno’s elaborate costume, with velvet jacket, white hose, and high-crowned sombrero, suggests Babo’s most mordant staging, as his empty, stiffened scabbard, devoid of its ceremonial sword, indicates the master’s impotence. And when the slaves finally unveil Aranda’s skeleton and reveal themselves in “ferocious, piratical revolt,” their attitude perfectly captures Delano’s— and perhaps the narrator’s—assumptions about Africans and their dubious claims to freedom. Each representation Babo stages expresses and anticipates the violence of that final scene. These deictic ambiguities in space, gesture, and time suggest a kind of representational grid for imagining the state of exception. In the offing, where all positions are fluid and contingent, stances are continuously altered and upended, displaced through dialectical images that refuse synthesis. Just as, in Kansas or Cuba, the greatest source of instability was the self-possession of slaves, so, on the San Dominick, the animated nature of things calls into question the claims of their purported owners. Consider the fate of the skeleton. It is Cereno, worn down by “nervous suffering” (52), who first exhibits that form, yet the figure is repeated in the skeletal remains of the longboat that shelters “family groups of the blacks (81), and in the ship itself, “launched, from Ezekiel’s Valley of Dry Bones” (48). When Aranda’s skeleton appears above the figurehead, it completes a circulation and exchange of persons and objects in a kind of demonic economy. In effect, Aranda’s remains—the flesh removed by unspeakable means—become a metaphor for the subject (person and topic) of slavery, the thing itself. Other objects convey a similar and barbarous instability. The barber’s block of the shaving scene, transformed in Delano’s mind into a headsman’s block, reappears as the block a Spanish sailor tars, closely scrutinized by two Africans, and is applied to Cereno himself, who, in his

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supposed icy reserve, has become “a block, or rather … a loaded cannon” (53). So, too, the inscrutable knot tied by a Spanish sailor is in effect constantly undone by the oakum-pickers, who shred rope while policing the ship, as Delano, knot in head, looks vainly on. Delano’s beloved longboat, Rover, faithful as a “Newfoundland dog” (77), returns as an ascription for all blacks, but also as a monitorial warning when Delano laments that burying his brother at sea was like throwing “scraps to the dogs” (61). And the ship’s medallion depicting a masked figure grinding a prostrate, “writhing figure, likewise masked” (49), returns in the figure of Delano himself, restraining both Babo and Cereno in a boat that the text associates with a skeleton and with slaves. As Karl Marx argued in Capital, money normally serves as a medium between commodities, an almost mystical power reducing all objects to its fluid form.34 In Melville’s text, the equation is more sinister, since all objects in a slave economy—slaves included—are reducible to corpses or skeletons. Possession becomes dispossession, and mutiny the only mastery in this ruinous order. Melville was acutely sensitive to the treacheries of ownership during the years when Kansas dominated national discussion. A $5000 loan he had secured from T. D. Stewart in 1851 to finance improvements at Arrowhead was soon to come due, prompting him, two weeks before The Piazza Tales was published, to write an anguished letter to his father-in-law. He could afford only the first half-year’s interest payment, after which diminished income caused, in part, by a disastrous fire at Harper Brothers that destroyed his unsold books, prevented him from drawing down the debt. Stewart would not extend the loan, and Melville’s appeal to Shaw, who had already advanced considerable sums, has a tone of measured desperation. “[T]he sacrifice of this farm,” he warned, meant “not only injustice to a prior & larger claim,” but would seem like “the forced settlement of a personal debt with property virtually held in trust—at any rate, not, truly, mine.”35 The air of selfless, unmerited suffering, so similar to Delano’s own account of the claim made against him by Cereno, caused Melville, too, to resort to the law—not only through an immersion in Delano’s court documents that threatened, as George William Curtis lamented, to destroy his narrative, but also through an appeal to the chief justice, at once the guardian and the guarantor of state authority. In effect, “Benito Cereno” itself was a legal claim appealing to an order as menacing and rudderless as a wayward ship. The failure depicted in Melville’s art shadowed the offense to his property.

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These contradictions come to a sharp, devastating focus in the deposition that Curtis so disdained. Importing yet editing Cereno’s testimony, Melville attempts to assemble a master narrative of the incident, but one revealing its entangled imperatives and demands. From one standpoint, the dispassionate legal voice intends to restore moral authority through a sweeping survey comprised of innumerable relative clauses: that on the seventh day after leaving port, at three o’clock in the morning, all the Spaniards being asleep except the two officers on the watch, who were the boatswain, Juan Robles, and the carpenter, Juan Bautista Gayete, and the helmsman and his boy, the negroes revolted suddenly … and successively killed eighteen men of those who were sleeping upon deck, some with hand-spikes and hatchets, and others by throwing them alive overboard …; that of the Spaniards upon deck, they left about seven … to manœvre the ship, and three or four more, who hid themselves, remained also alive. (104–105)

Although Melville’s document purportedly rehearses the testimony of Cereno alone, the range and authority are far greater, providing in its precision and detail a comprehensive view that easily exceeds Cereno’s weakened capacity. The legal clerks afford the mastery that the Spaniard had been incapable of demonstrating, in a manner identical to the narrator’s depiction of the benighted Amasa Delano. In this sense, the document, with its seamless incidents and disciplinary claims, seeks to bring about what the contestants over Kansas and Cuba never accomplished: a unitary version of the truth. Yet the deposition is not without its ambiguities. In Delano’s original account in the Narrative, he reveals that the mutiny on the Tryal occurred on December 26, 1805, St. Stephen’s Day. As the Catholic judges in Lima undoubtedly knew, and as Melville himself must have recognized, the occasion provided a kind of origin story and a rationale for the victims of the mutiny. A so-called proto-martyr, convicted by the Sanhedrin for supporting heresy, Stephen gave a sweeping self-defense before he was put to death, reaching back to Abraham and the Exodus to establish his own authority. “Which of the prophets have not your fathers persecuted?” he demanded. “[Y]e do always resist the Holy Ghost, as your fathers did, so do ye” (Acts 7, 53, 51).36 Detailing his own trials in the Narrative, Delano may well have imagined some kinship with Stephen, persecuted, as he claimed he was, by Cereno’s own unjust charges. But the martyr’s radical attack could just as easily assail the Lima judges themselves, whose desire

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to restore liberated property to its rightful owners made a mockery of the law. As William Bartley argues, the deposition’s meticulous naming of the mutineers, in many instances providing physical descriptions as well, not only rescues them from anonymity but also confers a kind of heroic stature, a “catalogue of the principals,” recalling the roster of Danaans in Homer’s Iliad.37 The conspirators become subjects, not objects, capable of true gravity. Like the databases of The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade, recovering traces of the enslaved from countless ships’ manifests, the deposition confers dignity, if not sovereignty, on these martyrs of the Middle Passage.38 The legal narrator also compensates for what, in Melville’s telling, seem to be gaps in Cereno’s account. Just as the narrator steps in during the novella to give streamlined versions of the Spaniard’s labored descriptions, frequently suspended by faintness or hacking coughs, so the juridical voice compensates for his suffering by omitting a prolonged account of the survivors’ travails, “which can only serve uselessly to recall past misfortunes and conflicts” (108). Indeed, Cereno’s most damning testimony is compromised, since he refuses to look at or identify the chief conspirator, fainting at the mere prospect of Babo’s presence at court as he once did in the rebel’s arms. Such gaps are occasionally filled by the Africans themselves, called upon to corroborate the traumatic tale. It was Yau who had Aranda’s corpse flensed, “in a way the negroes afterwards told the deponent” (112), just as Francesco’s desire to poison Delano “is known and believed, because the negroes have said it” (111). More disturbingly, the African women, uniformly depicted as vicious enablers, ratify Aranda’s murder and display in a curiously empowering phrase: they “testified themselves satisfied” (112). Even the faint legal stature afforded to these otherwise silenced and inadmissible witnesses gives them a subversive power, as if their presence were indispensable in establishing the truth. That power accords with the more subversive elements of Melville’s own critique—the subduction of Christopher Columbus’s image by a slaveowner’s skeleton, and the mutineers’ legitimate demand to be taken home. At such moments, the deposition seems to embody the wavering course of the Kansas claimants themselves, for whom natural right imperiled positive law. The interference of naked nature and law, the inadvertent empowerment and voicing conferred on the enemies of all by the enforcers of justice, is given ironic poignancy through the dry referential terms of the deposition’s narrative voice. The sheer length and breadth of the document’s endless sentences, its amplification of evidence in heaps of relative

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clauses, not only compensates for Cereno’s obscurities but also introduces lacunae, grammatical absences, often at moments of the most acute violence. Consider this passage on “the Ashantee Lecbe … one of the worst” mutineers: for that, on the day the ship was retaken, he assisted in the defense of her, with a hatchet in each hand, with one of which he wounded, in the breast, the chief mate of Amasa Delano, in the first act of boarding; this all knew; … beside participating in the murder … of Don Alexandro Aranda, and others of the cabin-passengers; that, owing to the fury with which the Ashantees fought in the engagement with the boats, but this Lecbe and Yau survived. (111)

The passage purports to indict Lecbe’s savagery toward his Spanish victims, yet the meticulous claim seems to falter at two critical moments. Amidst the chaos of the American assault on the San Dominick, when combatants, their tongues lolling like wolves, were panting for survival, somehow “all knew” of Lecbe’s assault on the chief mate. In the following clause, narrative authority seems further compromised, in “that, owing to the fury of the Ashantees … but this Lecbe and Lau survived.” Here the word “that” might well be deictic as well as propositional: that assault, owing to the furious defense, Lecbe survived. However, the conjunction “but” seems to reverse the claim yet again. What, in fact, did Lecbe survive—the assault? the attempt at retribution? the right to be considered with “all”? the need to fix position and responsibility—the deictic basis of the law itself? A similar ambiguity appears in a description of the women’s complicity. “[T]he negresses,” claims the juridical voice, “were knowing to the revolt.” Is this “to” an infelicity of translation, Melville’s attempt to indicate that the reporter “knows the English”; a suggestion of the women’s knowledge [as] to the revolt; an indication of their deictic position, fomenting—leaning into—the rebellion? In this sense, the deposition itself seems positioned in an offing, its claims of rebellion and piracy undermined by the ruthless guarantors who sit in judgment. In the retelling of the uprising, even in a distant Lima court, justice seems injudicious. Melville’s narrator, whose sage irony compensates for Delano’s excesses, is also occasionally compromised. The text countermands the captain’s dream-like absorption with a sweeping poetic sensibility, establishing a kind of narrative balance through cadence, diction, and supervision. In the opening scene, for example, the foggy offing is clarified through rhythmic projection, the “long roods of swells … fixed … like waved lead that has

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cooled and set in the smelter’s mould” (46). The succession of open vowels, reminiscent of Whitman’s signature voice in “Song of Myself,” published in the same year as the novella, establishes the narrator as the ultimate source of order, one whose hypnotic repetitions—“Flights of troubled gray fowl, kith and kin with flights of troubled gray vapors” (46)—suggest an inherent symmetry and solidity in the scene. That solidity is enhanced by the narrator’s frequent recourse to structures—the monastery and the summer house, the sportsman’s hall and the gallery. Such scenes animate and in part redeem the deadly ambiguities otherwise characterizing the San Dominick, but the narrator’s double duty, as supervising presence and Delano’s expressive consciousness, occasionally creates a dissonance that unsettles symmetry and order since the mutineers, as his judicious gaze affirms, impose an order of their own. In surveying the slave ship, the narrator must necessarily align his perceptions with the mutineers’ revolutionary designs. Monasteries are shadowed by thunderstorms; grand gardens run to waste; sleeping quarters become scenes of the Inquisition. The narrator’s ruminations during the shaving scene are particularly revealing. With “all the partitionings … thrown down,” the cuddy, as with the greater disarray that greets Delano when he first boards the ship, must be inventoried and composed. Hence we are presented with a catalogue of the room’s mismatched contents not unlike the roster of conspirators in the deposition: a lashed table, a “meager crucifix,” a “hacked harpoon,” a web of old netting “like a heap of poor friar’s girdles,” a “claw-footed … table,” a tattered missal (82). While the narrator thus directs us comfortably to what might have doubled as instruments of torture, settling us in as easily as Amasa Delano occupies one of the armchairs, the ragged collection of weapons and sacred objects suggests the failure not only of moral authority, but perhaps also of the narrator’s command. In a categorical statement presumably mimicking Delano, the narrator calls attention to the “blind attachment sometimes inhering in indisputable inferiors,” as in Francis Barber’s devotion to Samuel Johnson, or William Fletcher’s to Lord Byron (84). Delano thus misreads Babo’s intentions by likening him to legendary faithful servants. Yet is the narrator immune to Delano’s crass prejudices, given that the Anglo-African Barber, far from “unaspiring,” was sent to school at Johnson’s expense, received a substantial legacy from his benefactor, and attempted to open a grammar school of his own?39 Alternatively, can we assume that Delano has read Johnson’s letters, Boswell’s account, or Byron’s biography? Does Delano know so much, or the narrator so little?

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And if the reflection comes to us as a kind of hybrid, the narrator’s voice bending to Delano’s own docility and limitations, how can we be sure that other reflections are not similarly shadowed? Are not all such assessments of character compromised by their violent milieu, shaped, as it were, by the cutlass as well as the missal? Once the scales fall from Delano’s eyes and the “piratical revolt” is revealed, the narrator attempts to restore juridical order. With the San Dominick, its sails unfurled, now briskly escaping seaward, the American attackers trail just beyond range of the Africans’ weapons, firing occasional volleys until the sails are disabled and the listing ship turns back into their path. The deictic ambiguities that dominated Delano’s day now seem to disappear, as the two sides converge and the mutineers, backed behind a barricade amidships, are overrun, defeated, and confined to the hold. The narrator is also careful to anticipate potential legal claims. While rejecting Cereno’s anxious appeals to stay out of the fight, Delano is convinced to do so by the crew, in light of “a duty owing to the owners” (100), and the narrator prudently suggests that the marksmen who killed two Spanish survivors on the masts were tricked into thinking them antagonists, the urgency of retaking the ship thus shielding the shooters from responsibility. Nevertheless, there are strong countercurrents that challenge this restoration of order. With Aranda’s skeletal arm seemingly inviting the American attack, the mate, with scathing irony, shouts, “Follow your leader!” (102), as if enlisted in Babo’s cause, and in subduing the Africans, the crew’s “long-edged sealing spears” “mangl[e]” their enemies with “shaven” amputations not unlike those visited upon Aranda’s corpse (102). Indeed, the wounds, which the narrator links to the Scottish Highlanders’ inflictions on Sir John Cope’s forces at Prestonpans on September 21, 1745, imply defeat, not victory, since the Jacobite uprising was quashed at Culloden a mere seven months later.40 These ambiguities are echoed through the uncertain status of bodies in the scene. If the Africans now figure principally as subhuman victims—panting wolflike in retreat or taunting like “cawing crows” (100)—their assailants do not escape such associations, in submerging themselves during combat like “sword-fish rushing … through shoals of black-fish” (102). Their descent suggests that, like Delano and the narrator himself, the American liberators have yet to subdue the malignity in man. But if the restoration of property to its rightful owners does not settle the text’s moral claims, where can we look for Melville’s verdict on political authority in a state of exception? “Benito Cereno” suggests two

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alternatives, neither wholly satisfactory and, as the nation’s course after Bleeding Kansas would prove, both ultimately untenable. One involved the imposition of order masked as consensus. When, at an alarm from Delano and the hatchet-polishers, the four elderly monitors leap down and subdue the crowd just before relief supplies arrive, the Africans act the part of Kansas moderates who, in appealing to each side “not to be a fool” (79), would prevent needless bloodshed. Here, in a scene of mass absorption, was all the implicit menace of positive law, an assertion, akin to the masked oppressor in the San Dominick’s sternpiece, that force of reason can prevail in an armed camp. In this instance, as Daniel Heller-Roazen might argue, positive law, like the mutineers imposing order, may be only a masked form of piracy. Yet the text offers a furtive glimpse of another possibility, one not free of violence but suggesting a modicum of liberty. Only once throughout the day does Cereno affirm the status of an African, remarking, during Atufal’s presentation in chains, that the giant “may have some right” to a royal spirit, since “he says he was a king in his own land” (62). This spontaneous acknowledgment, more fluid and cogent than any of the halting, dictated remarks Cereno delivers, seems to stimulate Babo as well, who comments on his own status as “a black man’s slave” in his native land, “who now is the white’s” (62). These assertions of subalterns’ claims on a drifting and mutinous ship mark Melville’s most subtle response to the impasse over Kansas and Cuba. Denied a voice in the national debate, the principals in this moment of recognition demonstrate a tactical resilience and fluency, a sign, by all parties in the uprising, of genuine insight and expression amid the chessboard of violent acts. Authentic sovereignty, Melville seems to claim, arises from this dialectic of terror and self-assertion, through the ability to speak and perform the truth, fully acknowledging one’s subjection and despite murderous odds. In 1855, it was a formula that neither Kansans nor captains could call their own.

Notes 1. F. O. Matthiessen, American Renaissance: Art and Expression in the Age of Emerson and Whitman (London: Oxford University Press, 1941), 459. See also Rosalie Feltenstein, “Melville’s ‘Benito Cereno,’” American Literature 19 (1947): 245–55; Sidney Kaplan, “Herman Melville and the American National Sin: The Meaning of Benito Cereno,” Journal of Negro History 41 (1956): 311–38; David Galloway, “Herman Melville’s Benito Cereno: An Anatomy,” Texas Studies in Language and Literature 9 (1967):

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239–52; William Dix, “Herman Melville and the Problem of Evil,” Rice Institute Pamphlets 35 (1948): 81–107; H. Bruce Franklin, The Wake of the Gods: Melville’s Mythology (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1963), 145–50; Max Putzel, “The Source and the Symbols of Melville’s ‘Benito Cereno,’” American Literature 34 (1962): 191–206; Stanley Williams, “‘Follow Your Leader’: Melville’s ‘Benito Cereno,’” Virginia Quarterly Review 23 (1947): 61–76; Yvor Winters, In Defense of Reason (New York: Swallow Press and Morrow Company, 1947), 222; and Richard Harter Fogle, Melville’s Shorter Tales (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1960), 136–38, 144–46. For more recent appraisals of Melville and morality, see Michael Colacurcio, “‘Excessive and Organic Ill’: Melville, Evil, and the Question of Politics,” Religion and Literature 34 (2002): 1–26; and David Andrews, “‘Benito Cereno’: No Charity On Earth, Not Even At Sea,” Leviathan 2 (2000): 83–103. 2. Matthiessen’s American Renaissance discerns a morality play in the contest between the “good … Spanish captain” and the “evil … African crew,” although he comments that Melville left “unanswered questions” about the effects of slavery on that evil (508). In a late work, From the Heart of Europe (New York: Oxford University Press, 1948), Matthiessen states that a deep belief in “original sin” and “humility before the love of God” prevents him “from being a Marxist” (82). In Herman Melville: A Critical Study (New York: Macmillan, 1949), Richard Chase sees Delano as a spiritually superficial man unable to fathom Old World sin and its emanations in the rebellious slaves. Chase intends his study as a corrective to the “old liberalism” associated with “communist totalitarianism” (159, vii), a correction provided by Melville’s search for “moral truth” (ix). On Matthiessen’s politics and faith, see Frederick Stern, F.  O. Matthiessen: Christian Socialist as Critic (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1981), 143–45, 157–60, 230–32; William Cain, F.  O Matthiessen and the Politics of Criticism (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1988), 105–19, 180–81; Arthur Redding, “Closet, Coup, and Cold War: F.  O. Matthiessen’s From the Heart of Europe,” Boundary 2 33 (2006): 177–79, 190–91; Marc Dolan, “The ‘Wholeness’ of the Whale: Melville, Matthiessen, and the Semiotics of Critical Revisionism,” Arizona Quarterly 48 (1992): 28–29; and Eric Cheyfitz, “Matthiessen’s American Renaissance: Circumscribing the Revolution,” American Quarterly 41 (1989): 349–52. On Chase, see his “Art, Nature, Politics,” Kenyon Review 12 (1950): esp. 587–88; and Christopher Castiglia, “Cold War Allegories and the Politics of Criticism,” The New Cambridge Companion to Herman Melville, ed. Robert Levine (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 219–32. For an earlier appraisal of Melville criticism and the Cold War, see Donald Pease, “Moby Dick and the Cold War,” The American Renaissance

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Reconsidered, ed. Walter Benn Michaels and Donald Pease (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985), 113–54. A general appraisal of the era may be found in Richard Pells, The Liberal Mind in a Conservative Age: American Intellectuals in the 1940s and 1950s (New York: Harper and Row, 1985), esp. 328–39. 3. Eric Sundquist, To Wake the Nations: Race in the Making of American Literature (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993), 171. Subsequent citations will be given parenthetically in the text. 4. Most significant treatments of “Benito Cereno” read the text as a working out of binary—occasionally dialectical—opposites. The lengthy list includes the following examples, and their attendant binaries: Alan Emery, “The Topicality of Depravity in ‘Benito Cereno,’” American Literature 55 (1983): 316–31 (white vs. black depravity); Gloria Horsley-Meacham, “Bull of the Nile: Symbol, History, and Racial Myth in ‘Benito Cereno,’” New England Quarterly 64 (1991): 225–42 (racist caricature vs. empowerment); Howard Welsh, “The Politics of Race in ‘Benito Cereno,’” American Literature 46 (1975): 556–66 (Southern vs. Northern racism); James Kavanagh, “‘That Hive of Subtlety’: ‘Benito Cereno’ and the Liberal Hero,” Ideology and Classic American Literature, ed. Sacvan Bercovitch and Myra Jehlen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 352–83 (innocence vs. ruthlessness); Jean Fagin Yellin, “Black Masks: Melville’s ‘Benito Cereno,’” American Quarterly 22 (1970): 678–89 (Cavalier vs. Yankee); Richard McLamore, “Narrative Self-Justification: Melville and Amasa Delano,” Studies in American Fiction 23 (1995): 35–53 (greed vs. charity); Marvin Fisher, Going Under: Melville’s Short Fiction and the American 1850s (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1977), 105–14 (Old World vs. New World oppression); H.  Bruce Franklin, “Slavery and Empire: Melville’s ‘Benito Cereno,’” Melville’s Evermoving Dawn: Centennial Essays, ed. John Bryant and Robert Milder (Kent: Kent State University Press, 1997), 147–61 (social justice vs. imperialism); Alan Emery, “‘Benito Cereno’ and Manifest Destiny,” Nineteenth Century Fiction 39 (1984): 48–68 (Protestantism vs. Catholicism; American idealism vs. European corruption); William Spanos, Herman Melville and the American Calling: Fiction After Moby-Dick, 1851–1857 (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2008), esp. 116 (rationalizing narratives vs. discomfiting anomalies); and Jeannine DeLombard, “Salvaging Legal Personhood: Melville’s Benito Cereno,” American Literature 81 (2009): 35–64 (status vs. contract). My own analysis will address not binaries but dialectical images, in which contraries are not merely logically related, but bound through mutual displacement—the process of continuous, violent displacement that Benjamin associates with political representation.

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5. Maurice Lee, Slavery, Philosophy, and American Literature, 149–52. Subsequent citations will be given parenthetically in the text. 6. Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic, 57; Christopher Freeburg, Melville and the Idea of Blackness: Race and Imperialism in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 3. Subsequent citations from Freeburg will be given parenthetically in the text. 7. Jeanine DeLombard, “Salvaging Legal Personhood,” 47. See also DeLombard, In the Shadow of the Gallows: Race, Crime, and American Civic Identity (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012), 108–109. 8. Dana Luciano, “Melville’s Untimely History: ‘Benito Cereno’ as Counter-­ Monumental Narrative,” Arizona Quarterly 60 (2004): 49. On fragmentary narrative and rational discourse, see also Lee, Slavery, 161–63. 9. Passing or circumstantial reference to Kansas in 1854–55 appears as contextual evidence in several sources, including Franklin, “Slavery and Empire,” 151; Lee, Slavery, 141, 147; Yellin, “Black Masks,” 679; Freeburg, Melville and the Idea of Blackness, 97; and Eleanor Simpson “Melville and the Negro: From Typee to ‘Benito Cereno,’” American Literature 41 (1969): 33. Without citing Kansas, Sandra Zagarell notes the “exceedingly fluid” antebellum social conventions that undermine authority. See “Reenvisioning America: Melville’s ‘Benito Cereno,’” Critical Essays on Herman Melville’s “Benito Cereno”, ed. Robert Burkholder (New York: G. K. Hall, 1992), 129, 134–36. However, none treats the problem of Kansas as a measure of the social and intellectual crisis that Melville would interrogate in “Benito Cereno”. 10. The standard work on the Kansas Territory is Nicole Etcheson’s Bleeding Kansas: Contested Liberty in the Civil War Era (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 2004), from which much of the information in this paragraph is drawn. See also Pearl Ponce, To Govern the Devil in Hell: The Political Crisis in Territorial Kansas (De Kalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2014); Gunja SenGupta, For God and Mammon: Evangelicals and Entrepreneurs, Masters and Slaves in Territorial Kansas, 1854–1860 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1996); Alice Nichols, Bleeding Kansas (New York: Oxford University Press, 1954); Jeremy Neely, The Border Between Them: Violence and Reconciliation on the Kansas-Missouri Line (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2007); Robert Russell, “The Issues in the Congressional Struggle over the Kansas-Nebraska Bill, 1854,” Journal of Southern History 29 (1963): 187–210; and Sean Kammer, “Public Opinion is More Than Law: Popular Sovereignty and Vigilantism in the Nebraska Territory,” Great Plains Quarterly (2011), http://digitalcommons.unl.edu/greatplainsquarterly/2733; accessed October 31, 2019. On the activities of the New England Emigrant Aid

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Company, see Richard Abbott, Cotton & Capital: Boston Businessmen and Antislavery Reform, 1854–1868 (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1991), 28–49. For a more general appraisal of national politics during the period, see especially Michael Holt, The Political Crisis of the 1850s (New York: Norton, 1978). Several first-hand accounts of Kansas Territory, most written by Northerners, capture settlers’ hardships. See Sara Robinson, Kansas: Its Interior and Exterior Life (Boston: Crosby, Nichols, 1856); John McNamara, Three Years on the Kansas Border (New York: Miller, Orton, and Mulligan, 1856); Hannah Ropes, Six Months in Kansas (Boston: Jewett, 1856); G. Douglas Brewerton, The War in Kansas (New York: Derby and Jackson, 1856); Thomas Gladstone, The Englishman in Kansas: or, Squatter Life and Border Warfare (New York: Miller, 1857); and William Phillips, The Conquest of Kansas by Missouri and her Allies (Boston: Phillips, Sampson: 1856). See also Lydia Maria Child’s tale “The Kansas Emigrants,” serialized in the New  York Tribune, October 23–25 and November 4, 1856. 11. Paul Gates, 50 Million Acres: Conflicts over Kansas Land Policy, 1854–1890 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1954), 3–47; Richmond Whig citation in Piero Gleuesis, “Clashing Over Cuba: The United States, Spain and Britain 1853–1855,” Journal of Latin American Studies 49 (2017): 215–41, 228. In his attack on Lawrence, Jones acted on a grand jury indictment, invoking the internal police, that free-state establishments should be “abated as nuisances.” See Ponce, To Govern the Devil, 78. 12. On this matter, see DeLombard, In the Shadow of the Gallows, 42. 13. Congressional Globe, 33rd Congress, 1st session, Appendix, new series, vol. 29 (Washington, D.C.: Rives, 1854), 491. Subsequent citations (abbreviated, where necessary, CG), will be given parenthetically in the text. Unless otherwise stated, all citations are from this appendix. The Congressional Globe is available at Hathitrust.org. 14. Robert Cover, Justice Accused: Antislavery and the Judicial Process (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1975). 15. Report of the Special Committee Appointed to Investigate the Troubles in Kansas (Washington, D.C.: Cornelius Wendell, 1856), 2. 16. Dale Watts, “How Bloody was Bleeding Kansas?” Kansas History 18 (1995): 116–29. See also Gates, 50 Million Acres, 58–60; Ponce, To Govern the Devil, 45; Allan Bogue, “The Iowa Claim Clubs: Symbol and Substance,” Mississippi Valley Historical Review 45 (1958): 231–53; and Sean Kammer, “Public Opinion is More than Law.” The problem of forcible eviction arising from the Omaha Claim Club reached the U. S. Supreme Court in Brown v. Pierce 74 U.S. 205 (1868), where the Court restored land to an original claimant harassed by the predatory club. Melville likely read about Kansas claims trouble in the Springfield Republican, September 26, 1854.

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17. “An Act to Organize the Territories of Nebraska and Kansas” (May 30, 1854), Public Acts of the Thirty-Third Congress of the United States, 282–83, https://tile.loc.gov/storage-­services/service/ll/llsl//llsl-­c33/llsl-­c33. pdf, accessed December 25, 2021. 18. Etcheson, Bleeding Kansas, 6–8. See also Ponce, To Govern the Devil, 54–55, 57–58. After John Brown’s raid on Harper’s Ferry in 1859 and the gradual consolidation of free state power, Etcheson argues (pp. 217–18), many in Kansas began to advocate the rights of African Americans, enslaved and free. 19. For a discussion of American relations with Cuba during the Kansas crisis, see Basil Rauch, American Interest in Cuba: 1848–1855 (1948; New York: Octagon, 1974); Amos Ettinger, The Mission to Spain of Pierre Soulé, 1853–1855: A Study in the Cuban Diplomacy of the United States (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1932); Matthew Karp, This Vast Southern Empire: Slaveholders at the Helm of American Foreign Policy (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2016), 186–98; Stanley Urban, “The Africanization of Cuba Scare, 1853–1855,” Hispanic American Historical Review 37 (1957): 29–45; and Gleuesis, “Clashing Over Cuba,” 215–41. Walter Johnson examines the failed filibuster of General Narciso López, backed by the United States in 1851, in River of Dark Dreams, 330–65. On Melville’s interest in Cuba, see also Allan Emery, “‘Benito Cereno’ and Manifest Destiny,” 50, 54–55, 65–66; and H.  Bruce Franklin, “Slavery and Empire,” 151. 20. Select Documents Illustrative of the History of the United States, 1776–1861, ed. William MacDonald (New York: Macmillan, 1920), 410. On the Black Warrior, see Henry Janes, “The Black Warrior Affair,” American Historical Review 12 (1907): 280–298. 21. Pittsfield Sun, May 11, 1854. Melville regularly read the Pittsfield Sun and the Springfield Herald. Until 1854 he subscribed to the New York Herald, and it is reasonable to suppose that he saw the newspaper’s coverage of the failed coup attempt in Cuba, if, as Hershel Parker suggests, he visited New York City in early April 1855, to “submi[t] the manuscript of Benito Cereno to Putnam’s Magazine.” See Parker, Herman Melville: A Biography (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002), 2:246. Even when he stopped receiving the Herald, Melville may well have had frequent access to it in Pittsfield. As Parker notes, when Melville’s brother Thomas arrived for a layover on January 5, 1854, around the time Melville canceled his subscription to the Herald, Thomas immediately “went to the depot on North Street to Dodge and Hubbard and buy the New York Tribune and the Herald and their new rival, the Times” (193). Dates of all newspaper articles will be given parenthetically in the text.

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22. On Cuba, see Harper’s New Monthly Magazine 8 (1853–54): 257, 261, 409, 687; 9 (1854): 110, 250, 252, 400, 544, 684–85, and 10 (1854–55): 686–87. Harper’s also followed congressional debates on Kansas. See 8:550–51, 685–86; 9: 249–50, 398–99; and 10: 541–42. 23. Amasa Delano, Narrative of Voyages and Travels (1818; rpt. New  York: Praeger, 1970), 329. Subsequent citations will appear parenthetically in the text. See also DeLombard, “Salvaging Legal Personhood,” 38. 24. Sterling Stuckey and Joshua Leslie, “Aftermath: Captain Delano’s Claim against Benito Cereno,” Modern Philology 85 (1988): 276. Subsequent citations will be given parenthetically in the text. 25. Herman Melville, Benito Cereno, The Piazza Tales and Other Prose Pieces, 1839–1860, The Writings of Herman Melville, vol. 9, ed. Harrison Hayford et al. (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1987), 101. Subsequent citations will be given parenthetically in the text. 26. James Reddie, Researches, Historical and Critical, in Maritime International Law, 2 vols. (Edinburgh: Thomas Clark, 1844–45), 1:260. Subsequent citations will appear parenthetically in the text. 27. Janice Thomson, Mercenaries, Pirates, and Sovereigns: State Building and Extraterritorial Violence in Early Modern Europe (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), 14–15, 144–48. 28. Lauren Benton, A Search for Sovereignty: Law and Geography in European Empires, 1400–1900 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 128–30. See pp. 145, and 151–52 for a discussion of Spanish prize courts. 29. Jennifer Gaynor, “Piracy in the Offing: The Law of Lands and The Limits of Sovereignty at Sea,” Anthropological Quarterly 85 (2012): 822. 30. On privateering and piracy in the long eighteenth century, see also Edgardo Perez Morales, No Limits to their Sway: Cartagena’s Privateers and the Masterless Caribbean in the Age of Revolutions (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 2018); and Jeannine DeLombard, In the Shadow of the Gallows, 261–72. H.  Bruce Franklin examines the links between Benito Cereno and piracy in “Slavery and Empire,” 152–54. See also Tracy Strong “Follow Your Leader: Melville’s Benito Cereno and the Case of Two Ships,” A Political Companion to Herman Melville, ed. Jason Frank (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 2013), 289. On legal issues surrounding the seizure of the San Dominick (or Tryal) and Cereno’s deposition, see Douglas Coulson, “Distorted Records in ‘Benito Cereno’ and the Slave Rebellion Tradition,” Yale Journal of Law and the Humanities 22 (2010): 1–34; Brook Thomas, Cross-Examinations of Law and Literature: Cooper, Hawthorne, Stowe, and Melville (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 93–112; and Susan Weiner, “‘Benito Cereno’ and the Failure of Law,” Arizona Quarterly 47 (1991): 1–28.

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31. Daniel Heller-Roazen, The Enemy of All: Piracy and the Law of Nations (New York: Zone, 2009), 21. 32. Michael Fried, Absorption and Theatricality: Painting and Beholder in the Age of Diderot (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980), 66, 92–103. On Babo’s manipulation of time, see Kelly Ross, “Babo’s Heterochronic Creativity,” Leviathan 18 (2016): 5–21. 33. On the association of the Black Friars—a Dominican order—with the Inquisition, see Franklin, “Slavery and Empire,” 148; and Gloria Horsley-­ Meacham, “The Monastic Slaver: Images and Meaning in ‘Benito Cereno,’” New England Quarterly 56 (1983): 266. 34. Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, trans. Ben Fowkes (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1990), 1:199–200. 35. Herman Melville, Correspondence, ed. Lynn Horth (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1993), 292; letter dated May 12, 1856. The Piazza Tales was “Registered at the Clerk’s Office of the Southern District of New-York” on May 20, 1856, and “released to the public … [during] the week of May 24–31.” See Leyda, Melville Log, 2:515; and Merton Sealts, “The Publication of Melville’s Piazza Tales,” Modern Language Notes 59 (1944): 57. 36. S. J. Hartdegen, “St. Stephen (Protomartyr),” New Catholic Encyclopedia, 2nd ed. (Detroit: Thomson/Gale, 2003), 13: 509–12, https://cvdvn. files.wordpress.com/2018/05/new-­catholic-­encyclopedia-­vol-­13.pdf; accessed January 1, 2022. Citation of Acts of the Apostles from King James version. 37. William Bartley, “‘The Creature of His Own Tasteful Hands’: Herman Melville’s ‘Benito Cereno’ and the ‘Empire of Might,’” Modern Philology 93 (1996): 455. 38. See https://www.slavevoyages.org/resources/names-­database for a comprehensive list of enslaved Africans transported in the Middle Passage. 39. Michael Bundock, The Fortunes of Francis Barber: The True Story of the Jamaican Slave who Became Samuel Johnson’s Heir (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2015), 118, 129, 174, 194, 202. Barber died impoverished in January 1801, having outlived Johnson by sixteen years. In 1788, he was elected a dozener, or constable, in Litchfield. 40. John Roberts, The Jacobite Wars: Scotland and the Military Campaigns of 1715 and 1745 (Edinburgh: Polygon at Edinburgh, 2002), 94–100, 168–80.

CHAPTER 7

Emily Dickinson’s Picturesque War

In “late 1862,” according to Ralph Franklin, sometime between the Battles of Antietam and Fredericksburg—among the most calamitous of the war—Emily Dickinson sat down to write “It sifts from Leaden Sieves—” (Fr 291).1 Although this quiet nature study would seem to have little to do with the Bloody Angle or Marye’s Heights, the poem is deeply implicated in the imagery and ideology of battle, through a network of associations linked to the visual rhetoric of the American Picturesque. In the remote safety of Amherst, Dickinson never fully embraced this national discourse, but she used it to construct what Walter Benjamin calls a “constellation” of attitudes and ideas. Dickinson drew on the visual allegory surrounding the war’s darkest period not only to shape reflections on nature and sacrifice, but also to fashion an ethical response to the conflict. Portraying landscapes that inspired and terrified, she both conveyed and questioned the imagery of war. “It sifts from Leaden Sieves—,” a literal prospect of that attitude, may thus serve to lay the ground for Dickinson’s critique of violence. Dickinson, to be sure, was far from the disputes over section and slavery that emerged in antebellum states of exception. Although Amherst sacrificed its sons to the war and she may have lost a cousin at the Battle of New Bern,2 she rarely linked the deaths of friends like Frazar Stearns to a political cause, preferring instead a more elusive metaphysical ground. Yet Dickinson was steeped in the popular imagery of the conflict and applied © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 J. Fichtelberg, Exceptional Violence and the Crisis of Classic American Literature, American Literature Readings in the 21st Century, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-07845-3_7

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it with deep conviction to the challenges of war. The Picturesque, with its twin presentation of inspired landscapes punctuated by ruins, provided a topical reference and a global metaphor for her work, which so often mined the imagery of salvation and trauma. From this standpoint Dickinson’s divided response captured the essence of Benjamin’s chess game, ever inviting peril yet charged with utopian significance. But Dickinson also sharply questioned the ideological tenor of the Picturesque and its use of nature during wartime to assure what Drew Gilpin Faust calls the Good Death, the symbolic harmony of carnage and faith.3 On occasion, this dissenting position led her to assail not only Northern triumphalism, but also the promise of redemption itself. Her elliptical poetry is saturated with dialectical images, self-divided contests of substance and intention set against a violent ground. The Picturesque offers her a poignant frame for the exigencies of civil war. That critical attitude makes Dickinson’s poetry thoroughly political. In responding to the war through the dominant trope of the Picturesque, Dickinson insisted on the violence that this aesthetic metaphor denied. The Picturesque saw nature as a scene of rapture and ruin—rapture in the awe-inspiring landscapes conveyed by Thomas Cole and the Hudson River school, ruin as the physical and metaphysical limits of that transcendence. To contemplate a picturesque landscape was to recognize how its shattered or decaying elements sharpened and clarified the redemptive promise by measuring it against human incapacity. Transposed to the Civil War, the Picturesque—common in soldiers’ accounts of their experience— elided the shock and horror of carnage by resituating it in a salvific scene. Yet, from her contemplative distance, Dickinson could not ignore the murderous enmity of the war’s political content. The all-or-nothing dialectic of friend/enemy that Benjamin had adopted from Carl Schmitt to make sense of radical exception was indispensable to Dickinson’s response. For Schmitt, political enemies were not merely opponents; they were anathema—menaces that had to be purged and annihilated. This, in fact, was the rhetoric of Julia Ward Howe’s “Battle-Hymn of the Republic”— but it was a rhetoric often evaded in a civil conflict where the enemy was familial, familiar. Dickinson insisted on the radical context of that purgation. In doing so, she contested not only the pious response to the war, but also the evangelical premises that drove it. As a poet often claimed by both the Romantics and the Moderns, Dickinson is particularly suited for the kind of rigorous critique Benjamin envisioned. Her war poetry—or, more broadly, the attribution of war to

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Dickinson’s oeuvre—has challenged, if not revolutionized, conventional appraisals of her work. No longer can she be considered as standing apart from her era, asserting a kind of resolute quietism. With the attribution of so much of her art to the material concerns of her era, she now appears to be immersed in the kinds of immediate elements that motivated Benjamin’s work. Whereas much of Dickinson’s poetry seems firmly rooted in the Protestant hymn and the Romantic lyric, the matter of war strained the conventions of both—strains most evident in her tense nature imagery. An older approach stressed Dickinson’s natural supernaturalism, her absorption in the visual vocabulary of the pastoral sublime, whose dramatic landscapes disclosed the “mystical content” of nature.4 Yet the war’s devastation undermined that discourse, producing fragmented or deeply conflicted scenarios. Taking account of the war—which means reading the output of her greatest productive period as invested in her time—recent critics have read events into the landscape, treating the poems as simple allegories of the conflict. Faith Barrett, for example, notes the polysemy evident in “The Name—of it—is ‘Autumn’—” (Fr 465, 1862), where the conventional, if extravagant depictions of withered leaves are engulfed by torrents of blood. Similarly, Shira Wolosky examines how the jarring similes in “They dropped like Flakes—”(Fr 545, 1863), the shifting analogies of fallen leaves and fallen men, make the natural world “frightening”—a resonance that Daniel Manheim tersely labels “a willful, desperate, counterfactual harmony.” These strains in the natural order are echoed by alterations of poetic form. To Barrett, Dickinson’s contemplative lyric voice is affected by a “wartime violence” that exposes “the limitations of the romantic lexicon.” And David Cody asserts that the violent matter of a poem like “The Name—of it—is ‘Autumn’—” impelled Dickinson “to transcend traditional poetic vocabularies.”5 In Benjamin’s terms, such readings register the shocks of war, and Dickinson, like Baudelaire or Poe, becomes a shock absorber, a traumatophile. Yet if the war changed the tenor of Dickinson’s poetry, the tone remained one of contemplative poise. By naming trauma, her work kept the carnage at bay. Such versions of trauma, however—the distribution of temporal events over the flat surface of poetic form—may not go far enough. Readings that discern a subtext of anguish beneath an ostensibly placid scene complicate, but do not disrupt the speaker’s angle of vision. The landscape reveals complexities and symbolic depths, but its meaning remains stable and unitary, like an allegory in which all correlations are determined in advance. Recent readings of “It sifts from Leaden Sieves—” are a case in point. The

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poem, like so many of Dickinson’s nature studies, weds a conventional landscape with an elusive presence that nonetheless points toward a unified experience. Here is the earliest, 1862 version: It sifts from Leaden Sieves— It powders all the Wood. It fills with Alabaster Wool The Wrinkles of the Road— It makes an even Face Of Mountain and of Plain— Unbroken Forehead from the East Unto the East again— It reaches to the Fence— It wraps it Rail by Rail Till it is lost in Fleeces— It deals Celestial Vail To Stump, and Stack—and Stem— A Summer’s empty Room— Acres of Joints, where Harvests were, Recordless, but for them— It Ruffles Wrists of Posts As Ankles of a Queen— Then stills it’s Artisans—like Ghosts— Denying they have been—

Although the scene is elegantly composed, many historicist assessments detect beneath the drifts depths of “grief, fear, and desolation,” or the menace of a setting “overwhelmed” by the war.6 Such readings attempt to turn the prospect into a symbolic graveyard, to invest the snowscape with an inner history in which the drifts and joints, the “Recordless” features of a buried world, are connected categorically to the fallen dead. Material experience, figured through the remnants and recollection of battle that transform the most humble field into a strange, haunting ground, intrudes on the scene, as if Dickinson had deliberately skewed a Hudson River landscape to mine its volcanic depths. Yet the predicament literally buries these circumstances, composed by the quiet gaze of the narrator. A contrarian reading like that of Sharon Cameron, who sees in the storm a dissolution of legibility, in a “phenomenal world so subject to cancellation

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that it absorbs its own meaning,” does not quite dismiss the aegis of form or the symbol world it subtends.7 Even from this perspective, the speaker affects a sovereign consciousness imposing a synoptic view that cushions the shocks, as a battlefield cemetery conceals its dead. Benjamin came to see this neutral, contemplative attitude, effectively preserving the work from the severities, if not the matter of violence, as a form of reification that ignores the observer’s own immersion in history. A landscape insulated from savagery, he would contend, is merely the work of a conscript who has not yet recognized the battle. Indeed it is possible to read “It sifts from Leaden Sieves—” as a kind of denial, the pervasive snow, like the omniscient speaker, obscuring the agony. Concealing these picturesque remnants may well mask the true horror of war. In The Origin of German Tragic Drama, Benjamin first addressed the problem of time and form through the dialectic of symbol and allegory.8 Symbol, it will be recalled, bore the weight of Romantic sovereignty, the synoptic grasp of seamless universality, as opposed to allegory’s investment in ruin and death. Whereas the symbol appears to offer unmediated access to the divine, Benjamin argues, a transcendental leap through the substitution of percept and concept, allegory is saturated in time and marked by the labor of the negative, the “facies hippocratica of history as a petrified, primordial landscape” (166). To Benjamin, allegories are metonymic, each thing “pointing to something else,” and thus, to an unstable array of signs “both elevated and devalued” (175). To be open to allegory is to be subject to the regime of death that marks “the jagged line … between physical nature and significance” (166). From this perspective, allegory is not merely a timeless or abstract array of signification, but a dialectical process that traces the decay of symbol, of sovereign thought and its pretensions through the agency of death. Allegory reveals the traumatic structure of secular time. One might argue that “It sifts from Leaden Sieves—” presents such an allegory, in which “Unbroken” vistas are marked by sudden remnants of rails, stacks, and stumps. If the prospect suggests synthesis, the fragments, joints, and wrinkles convey not merely the elements of a grand visual field but the disjunctions of thought as it tries and fails to comprehend. Death is not just a premise but a constitutional element, signifying a terminus to reflection itself. We can see these tensions between allegory as form and as limit in a source of the poem that has so far escaped extensive commentary, Thomas Wentworth Higginson’s essay “Snow.”9 The essay appeared in the February 1862 issue of the Atlantic Monthly, to which the Dickinsons

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subscribed, two months before Higginson’s “Letter to a Young Contributor” and Dickinson’s own inaugural letter to him, and seven months before he accepted a commission in the Union Army. Dickinson, who, as Barton St. Armand demonstrates, knew intimately all of Higginson’s nature essays,10 would have been especially attentive to his work in 1862, at the outset of her greatest creative period. Although his method in “Snow” may be described as Emersonian pastiche, a reaching into the archive to convey a composite portrait of the season, it is more fittingly characterized as picturesque—the attempt to transform the pleasing diversity of a scene into a unified whole. Consciously echoing Thoreau, who praised the essay in a letter to Atlantic editor James T.  Fields (St. Armand 198), Higginson describes the invigorating pleasures in the wake of a blizzard. With the muscular Christianity for which he was known, he celebrates the “loveliness of the universe” glimpsed by “poor mortals … on the edge of infinite beauty” (189). All winter’s forms disclose that beauty—the “marble” garments of stately trees, the “fleecy surfaces” of lively brooks (189), the “labyrinths of summer” still “buried beneath one white inviting pathway” (190), the “lingering film” on the transformed face of the country like the “star-dust” of ice crystals that greets the day (189), the “large woolly masses” of frost “tossed … to the hungry South” (195). Higginson’s equanimity embraces even winter’s most severe effects. Recalling another devastating blizzard that forced a farmer to rescue his buried sheep, he describes the “uninterrupted plain” of “sky and snow” as pleasing rather than sublime, a “frozen sea” inviting calm heroism (199). And he ends with an account of a sermon on Psalm 147:16—“He giveth snow like wool” (KJV)—betokening God’s providence (200). Although Dickinson never shared Higginson’s unshakable optimism, there is little doubt that she incorporated significant elements of her master’s winter portrait. She, too, describes the “Alabaster” appearance of wool-like snow; she, too, observes the “Fleeces” covering the “Unbroken” “Plain”; she, too, notes the snow’s incursion into “Summer’s empty Room”; she, too, admires the “Celestial Vail.” While Higginson eagerly explored these natural wonders, Dickinson relished them in the more spacious sanctuaries of the mind. But Higginson was not entirely sanguine, nor was Dickinson entirely deferential. In a preamble to the study, Higginson describes the previous night’s storm, which took “unswerving aim” at the house in a visitation of martial savagery. “[L]aborious warriors of the air” engaged in “fierc[e] strife”; “noisy recruits” howled above the eaves like “hungry wolves” and

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incited deep dread over lost travelers (188). When the sun reappeared the next morning it did so as “a young conqueror,” an “undisputed monarch” imposed on a subdued land (189). In the future colonel’s meditations, one detects the menace of battles situated “to the hungry South” and advancing on the Union. In this light, the essay is not merely a complacent nature study; it is an allegory, in the Christian sense, of maintaining faith amid peril, of determinedly fixing on signs of reassurance coded as aesthetic reward. Like the shepherd who, overwhelmed by a blizzard that left him “speechless and semi-conscious” (198), rallied to save his buried flock, the North would emerge from its own fierce storm. In imagining the landscape as a chaste afterimage of assault, Higginson deploys the picturesque strategy common to the era. Higginson, a Unitarian minister who had been one of the “secret six” financing John Brown’s raid on Harper’s Ferry, here seems literally to bury brutality beneath mounds of aesthetic purity. Violence makes brief appearances through the suffering sheep or the withered remains of former seasons, but is otherwise suppressed or sublated, a necessary prelude to what, in the last chapter, I called absorption, a sense of settled harmony. In a shattered or ruined world, the winterscape is a literal plenum, a theater of reassurance. In this sense, the Christian warrior, soon to command a regiment of black troops, resumes his ministerial habit, offering an aesthetic version of the Good Death. The vivid essay is a denial of shock, of trauma. If “It sifts from Leaden Sieves—” shares some of this wartime sensibility, this determination to submerge peril, it does so with a subtle but shrewd reservation suggesting Dickinson’s dialectical response to martial imagery. While the poem suppresses the violence evident in Higginson’s preamble—violence that, as “The Name—of it—is ‘Autumn’—” demonstrates, marks Dickinson’s most overt war poems—it takes exception to the essay’s contemplative optimism by deliberately subverting its biblical message. To the calm reassurance of Psalm 147 evoked in the phrase “Alabaster Wool,” Dickinson opposes a truly disturbing allusion to one of the most menacing passages in the Gospels, Matthew 24:27–31. In the passage, Jesus predicts the “tribulation” of the last days, when “the sun [shall] be darkened … and the stars shall fall from heaven, and the powers of the heavens shall be shaken” (v. 29). That visitation, like the armies of an approaching storm, will announce the advent of the Son of man, “as the lightning cometh out of the east, and shineth even unto the west” (v. 27). Dickinson’s echo of the latter passage is bracing in its economy: “It makes an even Face/ Of Mountain and of Plain—/ Unbroken Forehead

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from the East/ Unto the East again—” (5–8). This was not the apocalyptic assurance of Howe’s “Battle-Hymn,” which appeared in the same issue of the Atlantic. In Dickinson’s reversal of destruction’s course, a Day of Judgment without end like a sun never allowed to set, she suggests that the storm may have just begun. Far from a quiescent landscape, this was a scene of recursive violence, as if nature were wracked by its own excess, reliving its trauma. With the world so thoroughly subdued and catastrophe still imminent, faith alone may not save. This supercharged natural landscape, promising equal measures of sanctity and destruction, was not merely the misfiring of poetic form or the groping for a method not yet revealed. Rather, in their conflating of rapture and ruin, both Higginson and Dickinson were echoing a vibrant American idiom called into urgent service by the war. The American Picturesque was less a genre than a process, a “drama,” as Martin Price puts it, embracing “the internal conflict between the centrifugal forces of dissolution and the centripetal pull of form.”11 The affirmation of picturesque harmony was not simply a matter of aesthetic contemplation or Platonic insight; like Higginson’s minute survey, it was hard work. Picturesque travelers often labored, through hours of dispiriting prospects, for a single rewarding aesthetic vantage. Thomas Cole, for example recounts a long hike in the Adirondacks that took him through “disappoint[ing]” forests and declivities before finding his way to a commanding prospect that repaid him with “blessed … admiration”—a response enlivened by the fancy that the surrounding trees might well have been “a congealed stream of pitchy lava which in some distant age had flowed from that awful summit.” There, for a moment, he found the balance between sublime terror and redemptive beauty demanded by his art. But such prospects could also inspire dread, as Cole’s sojourn in Sicily suggested. From its cliffs he encountered “within the compass of a momentary glance,” not only fertile fields and promontories but also “treeless and desolate” wastes and the “scars of volcanic fire,” the very signature of ruin that fancy had suggested in New York.12 The challenge of the Picturesque was to meld both visions into an aesthetic whole. Although it may be tempting to read the picturesque fascination with beauty and ruin as a mark of Romantic sensibility, the congealing of time in a moment of rapture, American writers and artists embraced the genre for what it had to tell them about history—their own as well as that of others. As Angela Miller observes, Cole himself was pessimistic about the “historical dynamic” depicted in both The Oxbow (1836) and his

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allegorical series The Course of Empire (1833–1836), wherein the advance of culture spelled the abuse of nature. The five wildly popular monumental landscapes of Empire, however—a tour de force of civilization’s progress from pastoral idyll to political dominance and decay—were routinely interpreted by his contemporaries as a narrative of lost cultures and other times.13 Americans, Cole’s admirers insisted, would escape catastrophe. As Nathaniel P. Willis argued in American Scenery (1840),14 “[t] he picturesque views of the United States suggest a train of thought directly opposite to that of … other lands.” Whereas European landscapes are marked by decaying cathedrals and castles, American prospects announce “a direct revolution.” “He who journeys here, … must feed his imagination on the future” (1:1). The sensitive observer of American prospects, Willis asserted, discerns “boundless majesty” (1:100) amid “busy scenery” both “picturesque and hideous” (2:15). America represented limitless progress and order. Even its waste products were prophetic: the “girdled trees, … burnt or fallen stumps, [and] rough enclosures” littering the landscape were transformed by the “prospective glance of an American” into the very “form of nature” (2:26). American ruins were but the signs of incipient triumph. As Miller argues, American successors to Cole largely avoided these depths, yet the Picturesque, with its admixture of elevation and decay, was a perfect conduit for Benjamin’s dialectic of symbolic communion and allegorical rupture. As the picturesque traveler moved through the landscape in search of inspiration, she moved as well through a temporal experience marked by the risk of disorientation and failure. Flawed vision could render inspiring ruins hideous; the most pleasing landscapes bore abundant signs of death and decay. The traveler was thus caught up in an aesthetic drama of her own—a rigorous, urgent, indeterminate attempt to escape, at least momentarily, the fatalities of history and error to seize a liberating beauty, only to be cast once again into what Price calls “the centrifugal forces of dissolution.” It may have been these elements—the existential crisis of aesthetic experience—that made the Picturesque so crucial during the Civil War. Soldiers routinely invoked the trope to make sense of the dissolution they saw. “The battle is described by those who witnessed it as one of very peculiar picturesque beauty,” wrote S. C. Abbott of the Battle of Gaines’s Mill (June 27, 1862), “if beauty can be ascribed to evolutions leading to such awful carnage.” The gently undulating plain, the thundering charges and counter-charges, the “[s] quadrons of cavalry … sweeping through the dells” all had the treacherous intimacy of a

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wild but pleasing landscape. More contemplative scenes had the same resonance. George Beidelman marveled at the “magnificent evenings” he experienced, the sunsets intensified “by the burning of the woods” fanned by strong winds that made the fire, “grand and terrific, see[m] to revel in its onward destructive course.” After the battle for Lookout Mountain (November 24, 1863), Benjamin Smith reflected on the “ideal picture” eastward past the mountain, a quiet counterpoint to the ridge “recently bristling with all the destructive implements of war and … sanguinary conflict.” James Connolly had a similar response in nearly the same spot, taking in “amongst these picturesque mountains,” the “rebel” encampments, the vanished Indians, and the “graves of Ohio boys.” Even annihilation was somehow comforting through a picturesque lens. Owen Hopkins recalled a retreat in which Union troops blew up munitions rather than ceding them to the enemy: The savage precipices reddened like fire in the sudden illumination, and the whole midnight gorge shone brighter than midday. One can imagine [our commanding officer] sitting on his horse, that glowed like a fiery steed in the intense glare of the flames, gazing with silent awe on the wild work his hands had wrought. … The trees and rocks, at any time picturesque and interesting, [were] now grand in their beauty. It must have been a scene more like enchantment than reality.

Hopkins here offers a version of battle as imagined by Thomas Cole—the contemplative observer enthralled by the wild but strangely intimate presence of a nature that seems to reassure even as it is being destroyed. Such landscapes were neither sublime nor beautiful; they were intelligible through the conventions of the Picturesque. The application of a cultural and aesthetic trope made retrospective sense of a violence that defied reason.15 Visual depictions of the war shared this sensibility. Sketch artists like Charles Wellington Reed, Theodore Davis, Winslow Homer, J. H. Schell, and Alfred Waud often rendered camp life and battle scenes amid soaring landscapes in which the scale of human drama is dwarfed. In “Experience of the 9th Mass. Battery at Gettysburg, Penna. July, 1863,” a color lithograph by Reed, the combatants are dispersed across wide fields fringed by distant trees and towering clouds reflecting and magnifying the smoke of battle. J. B. Bachelder’s moonlit “Ravine occupied by the picket reserves, of Brig. Gen. Joseph Hooker’s division … at the siege of Yorktown, April

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1862” depicts troops encamped in a luminous clearing surrounded by scarred and looming pines that appear, like the soldiers, to be on post. Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper routinely ran monumental battle scenes dominated by hill and sky, as if nature commanded the armies. Schell’s “The War in North Carolina,” appearing in the April 5, 1862 issue, foregrounds four Union troops surveying a distant charge as the smoke rises above ragged trees to a dominating sky. Harper’s Weekly Magazine, to which Austin Dickinson subscribed, featured the work of Davis, whose “General Baird’s Capturing the Rebel Guns on the Left of Missionary Ridge,” published in the January 2, 1864 issue, portrays the struggling troops seemingly embraced by lone trees and distant hills at sunset. Austin himself later owned a similar print, Le Rève, by Jean Baptiste Édouard Detaille (1888), depicting bivouacked troops surmounted by expansive clouds bearing phantom soldiers, like a collective dream of battle. Such images seemed to endorse the Union cause with meteorological, if not astronomical, conviction. Yet the scenes could also appear more ominous, as in Waud’s “The Battle of Antietam” (Harper’s, October 11, 1862, 644), which depicts Union artillerists in the foreground, peering beyond prone or lifeless infantrymen facing an invisible enemy just beyond a rise of land verging on distant smoke-scattered hills. The cannon smoke seems to merge with the clouds and the blank expanses of land to suggest both heroism and helplessness. As Timothy Sweet observes, these sweeping prospects attempt to convey the triumphant “ideology of Unionism,” yet they also announce, in their bombastic naturalism, the limits of human power. The greatest victory, these artists reminded viewers, was eclipsed by the menace of the sublime.16 Soldiers responsive to the landscape were often haunted by that menace. If nature held out the promise of reassurance, the violence of sight, sound, and sense signaled ruin. Ambrose Bierce found this confusion of the senses inescapable. In his somber essay “What I Saw of Shiloh,” Bierce gives his own version of the veil to be found in Higginson’s and Dickinson’s landscapes. Ferried over the Styx-like Tennessee River, which brought soldiers and the wounded to their deaths, Bierce noted the turbulent water, “vexed with plunging shells and … low-lying smoke.” Boats arrived from the “obscurity” and “vanished in the darkness,” while overhead, brilliant shellbursts expired in “rolls of smoke.” “Always from these regions of obscurity we expected the worst,” he confesses in another essay, “What Occurred at Franklin,” “but always the lifted cloud revealed an unaltered situation.”17 The menacing landscape magnified the terrors of battle. Such

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treatments of the fog of war are not surprising. The effects they describe occur in any combat, especially combat dominated by raw troops at close quarters. The Civil War battles may be unique, though, in their lethal mixture of intimacy and scale. Men fought in cornfields, from behind fences, nestled in ravines, inching up the arroyos of mountains, expiring in the blazing trash of dead leaves. The terrain shielded, exposed, and obliterated them. Even death provided only a partial veil. Bergun Brown lamented the “horrible state of affairs” involved in camping on graveyards, “where horses and men are buried or rather covered up—feet sticking out or hands and head.” Most horrible were the muddy roads, where, Cyrus Boyd recalled, wagons laid bare skulls, toes, and crushed bodies, “making this one vast Golgotha.”18 Picturesque prospects, under battle conditions, were often out of the question. When George Noyes—whose work appeared in Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, to which Edward Dickinson subscribed—ascended a ridge to overlook the battle of Second Bull Run (August 28–30, 1862), he found “a series of undulatory elevations, each fringed with a dense smoke, and breaking ever into fresh puffs from cannon discharges. … A pre-Raphaelite who should attempt to paint this battle would have been compelled to give … a smoke-enwrapped landscape, unless he threw aside his pencil and went in with the infantry.”19 The confusion of war overrode the grim assurances of art. The obstructed vistas of Bierce and Noyes captured one aspect of what Benjamin meant by dialectical images. Benjamin likened the dialectical experience to a “caesura in the movement of thought,” a moment when “thinking comes to a standstill in a constellation saturated with tensions.” For Benjamin, such gaps in reflection effectively erased historical particularity, allowing the informed critic, asserting a sovereign gaze, to discern the supervening pattern or constellation through a “violent expulsion … from the historical process” that yielded “now” time, a secular revelation through which a utopian order might be imagined.20 The soaring vistas of the illustrated weeklies suggest that order, as does Austin Dickinson’s Le Rève, with its troops resting beneath the flag-draped vault of heaven. This was common fare in Atlantic Monthly pieces Dickinson read during the war. In a laudatory memoir of John Frémont’s ill-fated campaign in Missouri appearing in March 1862, the unnamed author recounts the “picturesque region” of “broad prairies, covered with tall grass waving and rustling in the light breeze giving way to Agolden forests … inlaid with the silver of swift-running crystal streams” (9:375). But such contemplative scenes are shattered by the wreckage of battle, as the troops

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come upon the “ghastly figures” of the Union dead. One corpse offered a “terrible spectacle,—the bruised, mangled, and distorted shape of a bright-eyed lad” who had been found stripped naked in a field, his skull crushed “by a score of blows.” Only the consolations of nature, reclaiming the body “[u]pon a grassy hill-side, and beneath the shade of tall trees” (376), could redeem his death. As colonel of the First South Carolina Volunteers, Higginson himself had such an experience, recorded in “A Night in the Water,” appearing in Atlantic Magazine in 1864. Undertaking a reconnaissance of the enemy, Higginson, an excellent swimmer, decides to mix duty and diversion. Once in the water he gradually yields to its treacherous current until, losing his bearings, he loses his sense of the world. “The distant trees seemed not trees, but bushes, and the bushes seemed not exactly bushes, but … distant trees” (14:397). Soon “the whole vast universe appeared to swim in the same watery uncertainty,” and Higginson, overcome with a “singular sensation of nightmare,” felt as if he had been “preternaturally abolished” (398). The colonel, however, regains his bearings, returns to camp for dry clothes, and resumes command. The momentary terror has amplified his sense of Christian poise. Crushed skulls and drifting colonels, however, suggest a further dimension to Benjamin’s dialectic, one in which the observer, haunted by what he has seen, cannot seek shelter in the quiet recesses of now-time. The trauma Benjamin associated with the experience of modernity, explored in my discussion of slave narratives, cannot be dissipated by reflection alone. In states of exception like the Nazi takeover or civil war, history was not so easily mastered. This sentiment is evident not only in the acerbic reflections of an Ambrose Bierce but also in many of the pieces Dickinson read in the Atlantic during the perilous period when she began her correspondence with Higginson. The July 1862 issue carried Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “Chiefly About War Matters, by a Peaceable Man,” the sardonic account of war from the margins. Hawthorne’s dyspeptic narrator, who has missed the action around Washington, D.C., settles for contemplating the war’s “picturesque” (10:49) remains, in hardwood forests “unevenly amputated, as by a sword”; in the barren, “picturesque” burial mounds surrounding Fort Ellsworth; in the fields near the site of John Brown’s raid, fouled by “tenacious mud and [an] almost fathomless puddle” (53). When, at the end of the tour, the narrator returns to Washington, he is appalled by the sepulchral crowd at Willard’s Hotel, where officers and civilians seem leagued in “treasonable sympathies” and steeped in “picturesque criminality” (61). While Hawthorne’s narrator could not find even

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momentary redemption in these prospects, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. struggles for aesthetic consolation. In “My Hunt After ‘The Captain,’” appearing in December 1862, Holmes recounts his anxious search for his son, the future Supreme Court justice, wounded in the Battle of Antietam (September 17, 1862). The Captain had only recently recovered from a near-mortal chest wound received at the disastrous Battle of Ball’s Bluff (October 21, 1861), a battle commemorated in Dickinson’s “When I was small, a Woman died—” (Fr 518).21 This time, it was a superficial neck wound, although there had been a report that he had been “killed” (10:742). The father’s moving narrative has the tenor of an allegorical journey, as he absorbs the grandeur and anguish of the landscape. Approaching Sharpsburg, Maryland, site of the Battle of Antietam, Holmes is struck by the region’s lovely hills, “slanting up fair and broad to the sun” like a “many-hued mountain- chalice” (744). But the battlefield itself presents a starkly different attitude, as he encounters the “stained relics” of the wounded and dead, left behind like the waste of “some hideous orgy” (749). “The whole ground was strewed with fragments of clothing, haversacks, canteens, cap-boxes, bullets, cartridge-boxes, cartridges, scraps of paper,” and “garments rolled in blood” (749). While Holmes, a doctor, attempts to close these wounds through a calm, sensitive survey of survivors, his memoir is haunted, like Higginson’s narrative, by what he calls the “perilous borders” (741) of savagery exposed by the war. Dickinson’s leaden sieves could not veil such carnage. To be sure, conventional accounts of the Picturesque continued to appear. In the same issue as Holmes’s essay, Dickinson read Higginson’s “The Procession of the Flowers,” with its accounts of summer excursions along the Merrimack River in search of the “picturesque spot” from which to observe the region’s “precipitous” “cascade[s]” and “crevices” (10:654), and a two-part essay by J. E. Cabot, “On the Relation of Art to Nature” (February, March 1864), insists on the redemptive effect of the Picturesque as “a sense of infinity that can never be completed” (13:328). But, more typically, essayists’ use of the term was affected by the war, as in writer-soldier Theodore Winthrop’s lovely travel narrative, Life in the Open Air, serialized in the Atlantic in August, September, November, and December, 1862. Winthrop, whose account of his army service, also serialized in the Atlantic, abruptly ended with his death in the Battle of Big Bethel in June 1861, appeared posthumously in the December issue along with the pieces by Higginson and Holmes. In prose eerily and retrospectively marked by the war, he describes the treacherous ascent up Mount

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Katahdin, amid the “corpses” of dead trees, following a path “blazed by … [the guide] Cancut’s late charge,” to reach the luminously “picturesque” summit surrounded by “land-avalanches” and the music of streams that “shot by us” (10:687). Winthrop’s hunger for beauty may well have revealed to him an “infinity that can never be completed,” but it was an attitude literally shot through by the war. When Dickinson wrote her first draft of “It sifts from Leaden Sieves—,” then, she had at her disposal a rich rhetoric to imagine warfare. The picturesque imagery of rapture and ruin—and of rapture in ruins—anticipated and confirmed her own fascination with death in pastoral nature, yet it also allowed her to extend that pastoral impulse beyond cloistered meditations on gardens and fields to the dialectical encounters of catastrophe and history. In effect, she was operating in two registers, two versions of Benjamin’s dialectic—the one, redeeming history, the other, excavating despair. Poems about the effects of a snowstorm could convey both the glories of nature and allegories of failure and decay, like the “Acres of Joints” (as Manheim argues) barely concealed at Antietam or the ghostly “Artisans” stilled by the silenced artillery. If the Union dead could be preserved in the “Repealless—List” of God’s sanctuary (Fr 545, 8), they could also lie “Recordless,” like the scraps of humanity strewn across a battlefield. The rhetoric of the Picturesque allowed for both possibilities— necessitated, indeed, their continuous dialectical clashing and merging in a relation as relentless and shattering as the experience of war itself. Dickinson had imagined that relation in an acerbic study written in 1859: My friend attacks my friend! Oh Battle picturesque! Then I turn Soldier too, And he turns Satirist! How martial is this place! Had I a mighty gun I think I’d shoot the human race And then to glory run! (Fr 103)

Although the poem seems more concerned with a battle of wits than a call to arms, the decorative rhetoric, such as one might find in Pope’s “The Rape of the Lock,” is shattered by the wish to annihilate the race, a desire that makes glory appear sinister, if not barbaric. Here we are returned to the political element of Benjamin’s fourfold method, the enmity at all costs, the take-no-prisoners struggle. Carl Schmitt has been roundly

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criticized for his Machiavellian view of politics, although apologists have argued that it was the implied commitment involved in authentic political action, not its mortal content or outcome, that concerned him. For Benjamin, as for Dickinson, the stakes were much more literal. Neither writer could be satisfied by vague assurances of transcendence: even Benjamin’s stalwart utopianism was halted in the internment facility to which he was consigned before his death. For Dickinson, too, rapture had its limits. When she trains a mighty gun on the human race, she is also targeting the evangelical apparatus of piety and purgation so active in the war and so exigent in her own family, as she is attacking the premises of civil war, in which friend annihilates friend. As American soldiers trained their guns on one another, she summoned this rhetoric to interrogate the moral costs of glory. The picturesque pursuit of faith amid violence and despair became an instrument of ethical reflection. Dickinson’s interest in the Picturesque was not limited to the war. It was stimulated by one of her aesthetic models, John Ruskin. Although Dickinson’s sole acknowledgment of this influence appears in an early letter to Higginson, in which, as Jack Capps notes, she may well have been playing to her mentor’s sensibilities,22 numerous aspects of Dickinson’s art suggest the connection. As both St. Armand and Farr argue, Dickinson’s was a pictorial aesthetic. “Do I paint it natural,” she asked Susan Gilbert in 1852, depicting her “dismal” loneliness through landscape imagery. “I would paint a portrait which would bring the tears, had I canvass [sic] for it,” she wrote in 1854 of a similar longing. “I could fill a chamber with landscapes so lone, men should pause and weep there.” Both critics note that Ruskin’s aesthetic penetrated the Evergreens, where Austin and Susan collected luminist nature studies that Dickinson surely knew.23 For the canvas of war, however, Dickinson needed a darker palette, one sensitive to the ambiguities of battle. Here Ruskin’s pronouncements on the Picturesque, both in his discussion of J. M. W. Turner in Modern Painters and in The Seven Lamps of Architecture (1849), are suggestive. Far from dismissing the Picturesque as merely decorative, Ruskin argues that the genre is imbued with profound human significance. In effect, he contends, the Picturesque deepens and complicates sublimity by seeking out its “accident[al]” qualities—not the bombastic heart of wonder but the margins, “the least essential characters” of the landscape. “[T]he picturesque is developed distinctively exactly in proportion to the distance from the centre of thought of those points of character” associated with the infinite grandeur of the sublime. That aesthetic distancing produces a kind of

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inversion in which the formal harmonies of beauty in a work are displaced by what is hidden or obscure. Whereas in conventional portraits “shadows are employed only to make the contours of the features thoroughly felt,” in the eccentric economy of the Picturesque, Ruskin argues, “the features are used for the sake of the shadows.”24 That shift is both material and moral. In the hands of a great artist like Turner, the Picturesque reveals the attitude of “unconscious suffering” just beyond the contours of everyday life. The picturesque master is one who displays “largeness of sympathy” for the humble; to such an artist, the landscape and its figures are not merely occasions for a demonstration of technique but signs of the “nobleness” in misery.25 For Ruskin, as for Dickinson, the Picturesque is a deeply reflective medium depicting scenes in which distance and accident express the limits of life itself. Such landscapes, disclosing the principles of Dickinson’s art, conveyed the very essence of war. * * * By 1861, Dickinson had fashioned a subtle landscape palette expressing diverse tones. As Farr, St. Armand, and others have demonstrated, many of her nature portraits continued to convey the pious awe evident in works by Cole, Edwin Church, and other Romantic painters. But, as for Turner’s depictions of suffering, the war both darkened and dignified her landscapes, allowing Dickinson, through the pressures of conflict, to render searching reflections on the scenes. She does so by extending the vivid accidents of her poetic language. In The Origin of German Tragic Drama, Benjamin argues against the search for comprehensive truths favored in Romantic criticism by stressing the minute, fragmentary, mosaic nature of textual evidence. The idea to which individual passages and works gesture must be disclosed only “by approaching the subject from some distance” (56) and seeking its dispersed relations. Benjamin likens that process to discerning constellations, “remote objects,” to cite Graeme Gilloch, that, once “conjoined … cannot easily be undone.” As Max Pensky observes, a “constellation emerges [when] … a meaningful image jumps forward from … previously disparate elements, which from that point onward can never be seen as merely disparate again.”26 For the critic, discerning constellations is akin to the picturesque practice of recognizing the artistic unity of a landscape amid its manifold and conflicting elements. For an artist drawn to the Picturesque, assembling constellations is the associative, dialectical method of poetry itself. Dickinson was a keen practitioner

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of this art. Not only do her individual poems explore the inner significance of contradiction and accident, but she also preserved that sensibility in assembling the fascicles, constellations of poems as elusive and penetrating as the individual works themselves. To approach Dickinson’s picturesque rendering of the war, then, is to attempt to glimpse these constellations, moving cautiously but deliberately from landscapes evoking ruin or battle to those whose image, structure, and tone suggest larger patterns preserved in the fascicles.27 To do so is to adopt the attitude of the picturesque observer who, like the poetic narrator of “It sifts from Leaden Sieves—,” links stump, post, death, restoration, eternity, and terror in one unsettling gaze. Like “It sifts from Leaden Sieves—,” many of Dickinson’s landscapes written during the Civil War attempt to unify a scene marked by menace. The poetic voice allows us to take in details, both beautiful and sublime, unfolding in narrative time as if tracking the movements of an observer cataloguing a prospect. Poem 224 (1861) offers a conventional example: An awful Tempest mashed the air— The clouds were gaunt, and few— A Black—as of a Spectre’s cloak Hid Heaven and Earth from view— The creatures chuckled on the Roofs— And whistled in the air— And shook their fists— And gnashed their teeth— And swung their frenzied hair— The morning lit—the Birds arose— The Monster’s faded eyes Turned slowly to his native coast— And peace—was Paradise!

Although the premise of the poem is a sublime visitation, Dickinson distances herself from its terror by concentrating on the homely detail praised by Ruskin. Whereas the storm, like a “Spectre’s Cloak,” obscures heaven’s veil, the threat is registered by the smallest creatures, whose anthropomorphic wringing of hands and gnashing of teeth both domesticate and heighten the terror. Sunrise alone reverses the monstrous menace, a deus ex machina ushering in paradisiacal calm. An allegory of the Last Judgment, the poem also suggests the dialectical tension between the death’s head

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and symbolic unity examined by Benjamin, yet Dickinson’s resolution of the terror seems deliberately insubstantial. Unlike “It sifts from Leaden Sieves—,” which presents a gradual deepening and complicating of the existential survey linking landscape and apocalypse, “An awful Tempest mashed the air—” presents a facile reversal that seems to deny the initial terror. If Paradise is so magically certain, why endure the horror at all? A second landscape poem, paralleling Fr 454 in its “accidental” accumulation of homely detail, suggests a more pessimistic allegory that Dickinson applies in constellations bearing on Civil War scenes. The first version of “The Wind begun to knead the Grass—” (Fr 796; 1864) offers another impending storm: The Wind begun to knead the Grass— As Women do a Dough— He flung a Hand full at the Plain— A Hand full at the Sky— The Leaves unhooked themselves from Trees— And started all abroad— The Dust did scoop itself like Hands— And throw away the Road— The Wagons—quickened on the Street— The Thunders gossiped low— The Lightning showed a Yellow Head— And then a livid Toe— The Birds put up the Bars to Nests— The Cattle flung to Barns— Then came one drop of Giant Rain— And then, as if the Hands That held the Dams—had parted hold— The Waters Wrecked the Sky— But overlooked my Father’s House— Just Quartering a Tree—

Here the eye’s survey and the temporal sequence of the threat coincide, as the accretion of detail tracks the oncoming torrent. Here, too, the threat is rendered anthropomorphic—not through the acts of creatures but in the conduct of the storm itself, which literally seizes and treads on the town. And here, too, is a deus ex machina, a mere chance that in “overlooking” the speaker’s house—missing or hovering over?—the lightning rends a tree rather than the occupants. As in “It sifts from Leaden Sieves—,” the storm obscures and overwhelms the landscape, engulfing it

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in apocalyptic menace. The allegorical fragments assembled through this minute survey—what Benjamin would call the mosaic of incidents (Tragic Drama 29)—once again reveal a death’s head, but the calm, almost passionless account suggests a balance of terror and security. Death is made manageable through the picturesque association of detail. Yet that very distance and detachment make the casual catastrophe of the last line all the more disturbing: only the merest chance has saved the speaker from destruction. Salvation itself may be simply another picturesque accident. Poems 224 and 796 are emblematic of the dialectical fashion in which Dickinson addresses the Picturesque. Rather than seek a laborious balance of rapture and ruin as does Cole in his account of the Adirondack excursion or Theodore Winthrop of Mount Katahdin, Dickinson tilts the scales, allowing an accumulated menace to survey the natural scene, like a landscape imagined by Ambrose Bierce or Alfred Waud. Two poems composed in 1863 suggest this method. In “Delight—becomes pictorial—” (Fr 539), Dickinson portrays a picturesque pursuit of affirmation: Delight—becomes pictorial— When viewed through Pain— More fair—because impossible That any gain—

The Mountain—at a given distance— In Amber—lies— Approached—the Amber flits—a little— And That’s—the Skies—

While the sentiment expressed in the first stanza—the dialectical assessment of opposites—may be deemed yet another version of Dickinson’s proclivity for “sumptuous Destitution” (Fr 1404 [1876], 7), the exchange of mountain menace for heavenly serenity, as in Poem 224, seems ambivalent. “Amber” is a key tone in Dickinson’s landscape palette, conveying both sunset and the ossified permanence symbolically associated with death. Significantly, the word appears in two poems collected in fascicle 13, to be discussed below: the picturesque “She Sweeps with many-­ colored Brooms” (Fr 318), in which the “Housewife in the Evening West—” “dropped an Amber Thread—” (3, 6), and “The lonesome for they know not What” (Fr 326), in which visionary “Eastern Exiles … /

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Who strayed beyond the Amber line” seem stranded by faith and the afterlife. Dickinson echoes this ambiguity in another landscape poem written in 1863: An ignorance a Sunset Confer opon the Eye— Of Territory—Color— Circumference—Decay— It’s Amber Revelation Exhilirate—Debase— Omnipotence’ inspection Of Our inferior face— And when the solemn features Confirm—in Victory— We start—as if detected In Immortality— (Fr 669)

Here the rapturous “Amber Revelation” sought by picturesque observers, laden with contradiction, seems almost arbitrary—beyond the power of human comprehension, if “Victory” is to be achieved at all. In the picturesque terms to which Dickinson was drawn, is revelation rapturous or catastrophic, omnipotent or powerless? The answer, contravening evangelical pieties, seems beyond human perception. Hence the double reference to Amber in poem 539 leaves a doubt if the shifting apprehension of the distant mountain is an intimation of immortality or a trick of the eye. Does the mountain convey the aura of Benjamin’s sacred objects, or a mere facies hippocratica? A second poem on the picturesque drama of apperception, “We see— Comparatively” (Fr 580), suggests that while rapture in nature may be possible, it is capricious and perhaps beyond our control: We see—Comparatively— The Thing so towering high We could not grasp it’s segment Unaided—Yesterday— This Morning’s finer Verdict— Makes scarcely worth the toil— A furrow—Our Cordillera— Our Appenine—a knoll—

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Perhaps ‘tis kindly—done us— The Anguish—and the loss— The wrenching—for His Firmament The Thing belonged to us— To spare these striding spirits Some Morning of Chagrin— The waking in a Gnat’s—embrace— Our Giants—further on—

Significantly, Dickinson frames this dialectical apprehension in terms of the “Striding Spirits” associated with the picturesque quest, suggesting that it is the very insufficiency of our perception that keeps the quest alive. Yet here, too, the goal seems equivocal, compromised by the anguish and wrenching loss of Benjamin’s allegory. Dickinson’s landscape prospects, in this constellation of poems, seem poor vehicles for the affirmations of faith to be found in Romantic epiphanies. The full range of Dickinson’s picturesque readings of the landscape may be seen in a constellation of poems in fascicle 14 unmistakably linked to the war. The sunset poem 321 was one of three that Dickinson chose to publish in the Union fund-raising journal Drum Beat in 1864.28 While the poem seems to present a vivid Turnerian scene, it hints at the ambiguous landscapes noted above: Blazing in Gold—and Quenching—in Purple! Leaping—like Leopards to the sky— Then—at the feet of the old Horizon— Laying it’s spotted face—to die! Stooping as low as the kitchen window— Touching the Roof— And tinting the Barn— Kissing it’s Bonnet to the Meadow And the Juggler of Day—is gone!

Once again, Dickinson conveys the scene through homely detail, the kitchen and the barn in deliberate contrast to the shock of the mammoth sky. Yet there is something menacing, if not apocalyptic, about this predatory sunset expiring above like a storm about to descend, and the sentimental image of haze kissing seems upended by the casual trickery of the

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word “Juggler”—a reference Dickinson often uses to convey the cruel and arbitrary, as in Fr 1176 (1870): Nature affects to be sedate Opon Occasion, grand But let our observation shut Her practices extend To Necromancy and the Trades Remote to understand Behold our spacious Citizen Unto a Juggler turned—

While the existential unease Dickinson applies to the sunset—often a trope for spiritual affirmation—makes “Blazing in Gold and quenching in Purple” a curious choice for Drum Beat, the poem is dialectically balanced in the fascicle by poem 327, “How the old Mountains drip with Sunset,” an unambiguously gorgeous scene marked by the ebbing “Billows” (9) of the waning light distributing “Sapphire[s]” (11) and a “Wizard” (4) glow as all creatures settle in for the night—a sensation not even Guido or Domenichino could faithfully render (21–24). In effect, the two poems create a composite portrait, the meeting of consolation and doubt evident in wartime landscapes by Higginson, Holmes, and others. The remaining two poems in the group extend the picturesque pursuit of consolation while sharpening its occasions for doubt. John Shoptaw has read “Of Bronze—and Blaze—” (Fr 319; 1862) as an allegory of war. As is well known, Amherst residents greeted the aurora borealis with excitement and awe, Edward Dickinson himself once ringing the town bell to summon stargazers. For Shoptaw, the blazing heavens are a projection of glories on the battlefield, which “Infects” (8) the poet’s spirit as well.29 While the poem offers a cautionary contrast between these momentary raptures and the cosmos, the prospect of death changes the scene: My Splendours, are Menagerie— But their Competeless Show Will entertain the Centuries When I, am long ago, An Island in dishonored Grass— Whom none but Daisies, know— (14–19)

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The speaker’s anonymous grave seems to clash with the initial martial spirit, suggesting the speaker’s alienation from either the conflict or her kinship with the rest of the anonymous dead erased by war. Yet if this poem uses nature, in part, to laud the war, it is sharply qualified by one of the most haunting poems in Dickinson’s oeuvre, “There’s a certain Slant of light” (Fr 320). Here the heavenly light is not awe-inspiring but oppressive, conveying “imperial affliction” (11) and “Despair” (10). The poem’s second stanza suggests a picturesque impasse: Heavenly Hurt, it gives us— We can find no scar, But internal difference— Where the Meanings, are— (5–8)

A certain view of the landscape, Dickinson implies, eludes dialectical consolation, or any consolation at all. In a wound more harmful than any battle scar, the observer encounters only difference and contradiction in place of redemptive meaning. Such a light, counterpart of the snow in “It sifts from Leaden Sieves—,” suggests, as Cameron argues, that the landscape is truly meaningless, incapable of sustaining our frail desire for solace. In this light, the brave heraldry of bronze and blaze is only the wan jugglery of the dispossessed. Dickinson’s characteristic skepticism reflected in these nature poems attending war poses an ethical question involving the uses of violence. If the Union sacrifice were explicable only through reading sublime consolation in the landscape, what were the consequences of a misreading, of a blank prospect or empty place revealing the look of death? In the absence of saving fictions, was the conflict justifiable, or bearable? Such questions, sharpened by the unprecedented carnage of the war, incited rigorous dialectical reflection. In two poems she gathered in fascicle 16—Fr 342 and 343 (1862), Dickinson revisits the imagery of earlier poems to give radically different perspectives on the moral authority of vision. Here are the poems:         342 How noteless Men, and Pleiads, stand, Until a sudden sky Reveals the fact that One is rapt Forever from the eye—

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Members of the Invisible, Existing, while we stare, In Leagueless Opportunity, O’ertakeless, as the Air— Why didn’t we detain Them? The Heavens with a smile, Sweep by our disappointed Heads, Without a syllable—          343 When we stand on the tops of Things— And like the Trees, look down— The smoke all cleared away from it— And Mirrors on the scene— Just laying light—no soul will wink Except it have the flaw— The Sound ones, like the Hills—shall stand— No lighting, scares away— The Perfect, nowhere be afraid— They bear their dauntless Heads, Where others, dare not go at noon, Protected by their deeds— The Stars dare shine occasionally Opon a spotted World— And Suns, go surer, for their Proof, As if an axle, held—

Together, these poems offer contrasting assessments of consolation. Like the transported speaker of Fr 319, the attitude conveyed in 343 seems to have surmounted the smoke that obscured so many war landscapes, achieving that clear-eyed prospect available not to those merely tainted by majesty but possessed by it. While the war reference may well lead one to imagine that these “perfect” souls who are “nowhere afraid” and “Protected by their deeds” are noble victims of battle, the poem’s affirmation is far broader, declaring a faith in purity amid the “spotted World” reminiscent of Higginson’s “infinite beauty” or Willis’s “bewildering and boundless majesty.” But this vision of symbolic unity must be read in the shadow of the more compromised vision expressed in 342. Here the “Pleiads,” unlike the aurora borealis, are impenetrable. Their “Leagueless

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Opportunity” suggests that these stars have no human significance, nor can they be enlisted in any quest for spiritual security. Dickinson’s assertion that a sudden illumination “Reveals the fact that One is rapt/ Forever from the Eye—” is unsettling, since the word “rapt” signifies not only inspiration but also withdrawal and, most ominously, rape (OED). Something of the latter, devastating sensibility is conveyed in Fr 195, written in 1861 and transcribed in 1863: Victory comes late, And is held low to freezing lips Too rapt with frost To mind it! (1–4)

There can be no question of spiritual renewal in this sardonic vision of death, as meaningless as the distant stars. While such bitter skepticism may well accord with Wolosky’s examination of the poet’s “blasphemies,”30 it is much more directly linked to the ideology of landscape, the picturesque pursuit of rapture. All such claims, in this wartime constellation, are simply out of reach, Dickinson seems to suggest. No word, vision, or league of souls can find meaning in nature’s blank stare. If the heavens are truly indifferent, then how can picturesque readings of the war be justified? Whereas the picturesque observer seeks unity and grace, Dickinson discerns uncertainty and rupture. If the shrill pieties of a Julia Ward Howe echo the very violence of battle, can it not be said that the need to see nature as an ally is itself a kind of violence, an incitement to drench the world in blood? Although, as Cristanne Miller has argued, Dickinson, like her family and her Amherst neighbors, supported the Union cause,31 as a picturesque observer she cultivated a distance and sympathy for suffering that led her well beyond the symbolic sifting of the landscape. Her allegorical reflections, to use Benjamin’s resonant phrase, provided a critique of violence itself. Two final constellations will suggest the contours of this critique. In poems 580, 581, 582, and 584 (1863)—all collected in fascicle 34— Dickinson assails wartime assurance. The first of these poems, “We see— Comparatively—” (580), has already been examined for its dialectical attack on certainty. Read in sequence with its companions, the poem seems, as well, to reflect on the war. Poem 582 provides the anchor:

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I’m sorry for the Dead—Today— It’s such congenial times Old neighbors have at fences— It’s time o’ year for Hay, And Broad—Sunburned Acquaintance Discourse between the Toil— And laugh, a homely species That makes the Fences smile— It seems so straight to lie away From all of the noise of Fields— The Busy Carts—the fragrant Cocks— The Mower’s metre—Steals A Trouble lest they’re homesick— Those Farmers—and their Wives— Set separate from the Farming— And all the Neighbor’s lives— A Wonder if the Sepulchre Dont feel a lonesome way— When Men—and Boys—and Carts—and June, Go down the Fields to “Hay”—

Tyler Hoffman has discussed this poem in the context of the Battle of Antietam.32 While it offers a familiar, even comforting rustic tableau, imagining the dead as elements of a still-living panorama that anticipates Elizabeth Stuart Phelps’s The Gates Ajar (1868), Dickinson underscores its wartime tenor by reminding us of “the noise in Fields” and the “lonesome way” in which “Men—and Boys—and Carts … / Go down the fields to ‘Hay’—.” The poem, written “About summer of 1863” (Franklin Variorum 2:5), may well have followed the Battle of Gettysburg, in which over 7000 men died—more than 3000 of them Union fatalities.33 The clash between the blithe community and war’s severe harvest is underscored in the first stanza, where the phrase “congenial times” seems to suggest a joyousness destroyed by the “time o’ year for Hay.” Dickinson’s sympathy for these humble victims cannot stave off their sacrifice, even as the rhythms of nature proceed beyond their distant “Sepulchre.” The poetic speaker’s colloquial concern is undermined by this severe harvest of souls.

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Just as Dickinson begins this sequence by asserting that “We see— Comparatively—,” so she brackets “I’m sorry for the Dead—Today—” by two poems that suggest the absurdity of benign order. Poem 581 is arresting in its bitterness: Of Course—I prayed— And did God Care? He cared as much as on the Air A Bird—had stamped her foot— And cried “Give Me”— My Reason—Life— I had not had—but for Yourself— ‘Twere better Charity To leave me in the Atom’s Tomb— Merry, and Nought, and gay, and numb— Than this smart Misery.

The deliberate diminution of human claims—their reduction to a sparrow’s complaint on an “Atom’s Tomb”—suggests that the commanding perspective from “the tops of Things” is an abject fantasy—a “Dream,” to cite poem 584, that “would hurt us—were we awake.” The colloquialism of “I’m sorry for the Dead—Today—” is matched by the casual cruelty of the latter poem: We dream—it is good we are dreaming— It would hurt us—were we awake— But since it is playing—kill us, And we are playing—shriek— What harm? Men die—Externally— It is a truth—of Blood— But we—are dying in Drama— And Drama—is never dead— (1–8)

The ordinary drama of death, heightened by the war, sharpens the need for affirmation, yet here the poet can offer only the slim solace of an idle fantasy to veil that harsher prospect, “Lest the Phantasm—prove the Mistake —/ And the livid Surprise” (13–14). Nature, like lightning, cannot be bent to our spiritual needs. Once the veil of consolation is torn away, only abject violence remains.

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The distance—one might say the undecidability—of consolation is captured in a final pair of poems, both arguably picturesque in spirit, and one the most magnetic in the Dickinson canon. Although Faith Barrett has suggested that “My Life had stood—a Loaded Gun—” can be read as a response to the Civil War incited by an Atlantic poem titled “The Gun,”34 Dickinson’s poem may perhaps be best approached by considering it beside its companion in fascicle 34, “The Sunrise runs for Both—” (Fr 765; 1863). Here is the companion poem: The Sunrise runs for Both— The East—Her Purple Troth Keeps with the Hill— The Noon unwinds Her Blue Till One Breadth cover Two— Remotest—still— Nor does the Night forget A Lamp for Each—to set— Wicks wide away— The North—Her blazing Sign Erects in Iodine— Till Both—can see— The Midnight’s Dusky Arms Clasp Hemispheres, and Homes And so Upon Her Bosom—One— And One opon Her Hem— Both lie—

This prospect poem, reminiscent of a Cole landscape, depicts the order and harmony of the day through a luminist portrait of affection. The hill reflecting and absorbing light is more than just a feature in a composition; it is a recipient of and testament to love. The phrase “blazing sign,” evoking both sunset and aurora, suggests the calm assurance of an orderly world in which the only disruption is the light from a distant star, enfolding even the “Dusky” arms of Northern combatants. How much more intimate and disturbing, then, is the love relation depicted in Poem 764? Feminist scholarship has seen in this poem a stark portrait of emotional and sexual exploitation.35 In light of its successor poem depicting the redemptive heavens, “My Life had stood—a Loaded Gun—” suggests the

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violent, unstable, perhaps murderous intention behind the picturesque search for assurance itself. The poem’s riddling merger of object and consciousness in the gun’s impersonation imposes a hermeneutic dilemma as unsettling as that posed in fascicle 25. Should we attempt to read symbolically, seeking unity amid the unsettling violence, we risk affirming that the loving order of nature is a mere screen for aggression. Should we read the poem metonymically, the speaker’s relation to the “Master” is compromised, if not suicidal. The speaker’s roaming through “Sovreign Woods” (5) conveys the action of a picturesque excursion, as well as the sovereign survey of critical thought itself, while the diurnal account of activities, extending from morning to sunset, simulates the Romantic harmony of Poem 765. However, the speaker’s attitude suggests an abandonment of sovereignty. The gun is wholly “identified” (3) with its owner. It guards the master even as it appropriates his features, his murderous eye and thumb. And just as the speaker’s fusion with its owner fully affirms its subjection, so its movement through the landscape renders nature a sham. Here is the gun counterfeiting the evening glow through a kind of thermodynamic explosion, echoing Vesuvius even in the most serene settings, attacking doe and enemy alike. In her focus on this brutal instrument of war, Dickinson has blurred the boundaries between affection and murder, rendering every act of love a death’s head, a picturesque annihilation of nature itself. The poem, so resistant to unified or symbolic readings, is an allegory, in Benjamin’s sense of the term, a set of metonymic displacements tracing “the jagged line between physical nature and significance.” Across that unstable boundary, love succumbs to savagery, sympathy to subjection, and nature to destruction. It was Henry David Thoreau, as Nancy Mayer notes, who, near the end of Walden observed, “Nature is so rife with life that myriads can be afforded to prey on one another … and … it has sometimes rained flesh and blood!“36 In the Civil War’s darkest moments, as in the months following Antietam, nature itself must have often seemed a combatant, denying refuge or consolation. Under these skies, seekers after glory may have had the power to kill, but they could not be saved. There could be no more devastating portrait of the consequences of war. Yet the haunting quality of Poem 764 exceeds its origin in war to reflect on the wider consequences of American violence. The peculiar relation of Owner to instrument recalls that peculiar institution of slavery inciting the conflict. As the Owner’s property, the rifle is intimately affected by violence before a single shot is fired, a violation underscored by the unsettling

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self-awareness of the weapon. In this light, the “Sovreign” excursion into the woods subverts the notion of power, as the gun’s “emphatic Thumb” challenges agency. This is not the struggle of Hegelian master and slave but an uncanny merging of master and object in a constantly shifting dialectic in which the appropriation of the other, in thought and action, can no longer be pinned down. It is in the final lines of the poem that Dickinson most fully realizes that dialectic. While both master and instrument may kill, only the servant is beyond death. Yet that exception does not confer mastery. Rather, Dickinson leaves us with an uncertain and devastating empty place in which intention, thought, and violence interminably clash and merge. Not mastery but emergency marked the inner history of the war. “War feels to me an oblique place,” Dickinson wrote to Higginson in 1863.37 That distance from battle, long thought to signify indifference, has lately assumed an altered character, as scholars have revealed the poet’s sensitive reflections on the conflict. Obliquity, for Dickinson, meant more than native reserve. Allied with the ideological and aesthetic warrant of the Picturesque, Dickinson’s perspective signified at once the prospect that would confer spiritual authority, the labor and uncertainty involved in attaining that prospect, the acute sympathy crucial in depicting war-­ ravaged nature and war-torn soldiers, and the critical perspective, sharpened by death, exposing the emptiness of the experience. In writing picturesque poems about war, Dickinson was sounding all these chords. She sought both to laud war’s victims and to challenge its violence, to celebrate the redemptive possibilities of nature even as nature was being destroyed. “My Life had stood, a Loaded Gun—” expresses the deeply conflicted character of that vision, through the eyes of a loving killer. Rapture in destruction was the aesthetic challenge of the Picturesque, and the haunting ethical conflict that Dickinson exposed in the nature of war.

Notes 1. The Poems of Emily Dickinson: Variorum Edition, ed. Ralph Franklin, 3 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge: Belknap Press, 1998), 1:311. All citations of Dickinson’s poems are from this edition, and will be given parenthetically in the text. 2. Benjamin Friedlander, “Emily Dickinson and the Battle of Ball’s Bluff,” PMLA 124 (2009): 1596. 3. Drew Gilpin Faust, This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War (New York: Vintage, 2009), 6.

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4. Judith Farr, The Passion of Emily Dickinson (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992), 50. See also Barton St. Armand, Emily Dickinson and Her Culture: The Soul’s Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 228–30. For Cole’s influence on Dickinson, see Renée Bergland, “The Eagle’s Eye: Dickinson’s View of Battle,” A Companion to Emily Dickinson, ed. Martha Nell Smith and Mary Loeffelholz (Malden: Blackwell Press, 2008), 139–42. Farr has revisited Dickinson’s engagement with painting in “Dickinson and the Visual Arts,” The Emily Dickinson Handbook, ed. Gudrun Grabher, Roland Hagenbüchle, and Cristanne Miller (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1998), 61–92. 5. Faith Barrett, To Fight Aloud is Very Brave: American Poetry and the Civil War (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2012), 145–51 (citation on 144); Shira Wolosky, Emily Dickinson: A Voice of War (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984), 37–38; Daniel Manheim, “Emily Dickinson’s Republic of Suffering,” Literary Imagination 15 (2013): 285; David Cody, “Blood in the Basin: The Civil War in Emily Dickinson’s ‘The name of it is Autumn,’” Emily Dickinson Journal 12 (2003): 33. See also Randall Fuller, From Battlefields Rising: How the Civil War Transformed American Literature (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 86–87; Tyler Hoffman, “Emily Dickinson and the Limit of War,” Emily Dickinson Journal 3 (1994): 1–18; and Cristanne Miller, Reading in Time: Emily Dickinson in the Nineteenth Century (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2012), 160. For overviews of the influence of the war on Dickinson’s poetry, see Miller, 147–75, and Shira Wolosky, “Public and Private in Dickinson’s War Poetry,” A Historical Guide to Emily Dickinson, ed. Vivian Pollak (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 103–31. 6. Ed Folsom, “‘The Souls That Snow’: Winter in the Poetry of Emily Dickinson,” American Literature 47 (1975): 371; Martha Nell Smith, “Civil War(s) and Dickinson Manuscript Book Reconstructions, Deconstructed,” Dickinson’s Fascicles: A Spectrum of Possibilities, ed. Paul Crumbley and Eleanor Heginbotham (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2014), 136. See also Manheim, “Republic of Suffering,” 285, 286. Domnhall Mitchell, while acknowledging that “the poem’s images would appear to relate most easily to the Civil War,” argues that Dickinson is here preoccupied by class privilege. See “Emily Dickinson and Class,” The Cambridge Companion to Emily Dickinson, ed. Wendy Martin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 204–205. 7. Sharon Cameron, Lyric Time: Dickinson and the Limits of Genre (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979), 175, 173. 8. Walter Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, trans. John Osborne (London: Verso, 1998). Citations from this edition will be given parenthetically in the text.

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9. Thomas Wentworth Higginson, “Snow,” The Atlantic Monthly Magazine 9 (1862), 188–202, https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=uc1. c042831433&view=1up&seq=11 (accessed July 28, 2013). Citations to this as well as other articles in the Atlantic in the Hathi Trust Digital Library will be given parenthetically in the text. 10. Barton St. Armand, Emily Dickinson and Her Culture, 202. Subsequent citations will be given parenthetically in the text. 11. Martin Price, “The Picturesque Moment,” From Sensibility to Romanticism: Essays Presented to Frederick A.  Pottle, ed. Frederick Hilles and Harold Bloom (New York: Oxford University Press, 1965), 277. The term “American Picturesque” is borrowed from John Conron, American Picturesque (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2000). 12. Thomas Cole, The Collected Essays and Prose Sketches, ed. Marshall Tymn (St. Paul: John Colet Press, 1980), 148, 34, 25, 23. On the Picturesque, see also Malcolm Andrews, The Search for the Picturesque: Landscape Aesthetics and Tourism in Britain, 1760–1800 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1989); Ann Bermingham, Landscape and Ideology: The English Rustic Tradition, 1740–1860 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986); Dennis Berthold, “Charles Brockden Brown, Edgar Huntly, and the Origins of the American Picturesque,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser. 41 (1984): 62–84; The Politics of the Picturesque: Literature, Landscape and Aesthetics Since 1770, ed. Stephen Copley and Peter Garside (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994); Christopher Hussey, The Picturesque: Studies in a Point of View (London: Putnam, 1927); Larry Kutchen, “The ‘Vulgar Thread of the Canvas’: Revolution and the Picturesque in Ann Eliza Bleecker, Crèvecoeur, and Charles Brockden Brown,” Early American Literature 36 (2001): 395–425; Robert Mayhew, “William Gilpin and the Latitudinarian Picturesque,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 33 (2000): 349–66; Blake Nevius, Cooper’s Landscapes: An Essay on the Picturesque Vision (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976); and Kim Michasiw, “Nine Revisionist Theses on the Picturesque,” Representations 38 (1992): 76–100. For eighteenth-century theorists, see esp. William Gilpin, Three Essays: On Picturesque Beauty; On Picturesque Travel; and On Sketching Landscape (London: Printed for R. Blamire, 1792). 13. Angela Miller, The Empire of the Eye: Landscape Representation and American Cultural Politics, 1825–1875 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993), 44, 69. 14. Nathaniel P.  Willis, American Scenery, 2 vols. (London: George Virtue, 1840). Citations will be given parenthetically in the text. 15. S.  C. Abbott, “Heroic Deeds of Heroic Men,” Harper’s New Monthly Magazine 30, no. 177 (February 1864): 716 [accessed through Hathi

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Trust]; George Beidelman, The Civil War Letters of George Washington Beidelman, ed. Catherine Vanderslice (New York: Vantage Press, 1978), 122; Benjamin Smith, Private Smith’s Journal: Recollections of the Late War, ed. Clyde Walton (Chicago: Lakeside Press, 1963), 136; James Connolly, Three Years in the Army of the Cumberland: The Letters and Diary of Major James A. Connolly, ed. Paul Angle (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1959), 180; Owen Hopkins, Under the Flag of the Nation: Diaries and Letters of a Yankee Volunteer in the Civil War, ed. Otto Bond (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1961), 38. See also John De Forest, A Volunteer’s Adventures: A Union Captain’s Record of the Civil War, ed. James Croushore (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1946), 120; James Horrocks, My Dear Parents: The Civil War Seen by an English Union Soldier, ed. A.  S. Lewis (San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1982), 82; Stephen Ramseur, The Bravest of the Brave: The Correspondence of Stephen Dodson Ramseur, ed. George Kundahl (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010), 269–70; Henry and Charles Trueheart, Rebel Brothers: The Civil War Letters of the Truehearts, ed. Edward Williams (College Station: Texas A & M University Press, 1995), 92; Joshua Callaway, The Civil War Letters of Joshua K. Callaway, ed. Judith Hallock (Athens, Georgia: University of Georgia Press, 1997), 157; Edward Wightman, From Antietam to Fort Fisher: The Civil War Letters of Edward King Wightman, ed. Edward Longacre (Rutherford: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1985), 152; and Earl Hess, The Union Soldier in Battle: Enduring the Ordeal of Combat (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 1997), 14. 16. Reed’s lithograph, from the collection of Brown University, may be seen at https://repositor y.librar y.brown.edu/studio/item/bdr:237535/. Bachelder’s lithograph may be found in the Library of Congress collection, http://loc.gov/pictures/resource/cph.3a04993/.Schell’s image from Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper appears on p. 324 of the April 5, 1862 issue. Davis’s illustration appears on p.4 of Harper’s Weekly for January 2, 1864, available at https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=md p.39015021733780&view=1up&seq=14&skin=2021&q1=missionary. Detaille’s print is available at Five Colleges and Historic Deerefield Village Consortium [Emily Dickinson Museum collection]: http://museums. fivecolleges.edu/detail.php?museum=ac&t=objects&type=ext&f=&s=&re cord=0&id_number=Ac+edm&op-­e arliest_year=%3E%3D&op-­l atest_ year=%3C%3D. Waud’s “The Battle of Antietam” may be found at https:// babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=mdp.39015021016210&view=1up&se q=589&skin=2021&q1=antietam. Timothy Sweet’s observation appears in Traces of War: Poetry, Photography, and the Crisis of the Union (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990), 95. While Sweet is incisive about the ideological uses of the Picturesque, he discounts the dialectical charac-

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ter of the genre, reading it only as an evasion of history, as in N. P. Willis’s American Scenery. For critical observers, however, the prospect of ruin may have undercut the project of “unified nationalism” (Sweet 106), exposing the historical urgency of the genre. 17. Ambrose Bierce, The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce (1909; New York: Gordian Press, 1966), 1:240–41, 326. 18. Brown and Boyd cited in Joseph Frank and George Reaves, “Seeing the Elephant”: Raw Recruits at the Battle of Shiloh (New York: Greenwood Press, 1989), 123. 19. George Noyes, The Bivouac and the Battle-Field; or, Campaign Sketches in Virginia and Maryland (New York: Harper, 1863), 127. 20. Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, 475 [N10a,3]; 463 [N3,1]. 21. Friedlander, “Ball’s Bluff,” 1585. 22. Jack Capps, Emily Dickinson’s Reading, 1836–1886 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1966), 22. 23. The Letters of Emily Dickinson, ed. Thomas Johnson, 3 vols. (Cambridge: Belknap Press, 1958), Letter 85, 193; Letter 176, 310. St. Armand, Emily Dickinson and her Culture, 219–58; Farr, The Passion of Emily Dickinson, 249–313. Farr cites Dickinson’s letters on pp. 251–52, and discusses her engagement with the Hudson River school on 252. Both scholars are more concerned with Dickinson’s Romantic sensibilities than with the influence of the Picturesque. 24. John Ruskin, The Seven Lamps of Architecture (London: Smith, Elder, 1849), 174, 175. 25. Ruskin, Modern Painters, vol. 4 (London: Smith, Elder, 1851), 6, 9, 12. 26. Graeme Gilloch, Walter Benjamin, 70; Max Pensky, Melancholy Dialectics, 70. The Pensky passage appears in Gilloch, 71. 27. Although Ralph Franklin denies that the fascicles represent anything other than Dickinson’s desire “to reduce disorder,” other scholars have discerned artistic purpose. Sharon Cameron argues that Dickinson “intended to associate these poems with each other,” suggesting an “extraordinarily complex, perhaps even conflicted, set of intentions, beliefs, [and] desires.” See Franklin, “Introduction,” The Manuscript Books of Emily Dickinson, ed. Ralph Franklin, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Belknap Press, 1981), 1: ix; and Cameron, Choosing Not Choosing: Dickinson’s Fascicles (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 19. In Reading the Fascicles of Emily Dickinson: Dwelling in Possibilities, Eleanor Heginbotham asserts that poems ­associated in Dickinson’s fascicles “concatenate against each other, as they echo and speak to each other across the page,” creating “a web of interconnections” (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2003), 5, 106. In “‘Looking at Death, is Dying’: Fascicle 16 in a Civil War Context,” Paula Bennett argues that although the fascicles may not have the integrity or intention of free-standing works, they represent Dickinson’s response to “a

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specific time, with specific concerns in mind”—fascicle 16 reflecting the “horror” of the Civil War. See Dickinson’s Fascicles, 109, 108. While acknowledging the difficulties of decoding fascicles that may have been dispersed and reassembled several times, Martha Nell Smith argues that fascicle 24, in which “It sifts from Leaden Sieves—” appears, is “permeated with symbols and images that suggest the Civil War.” See “Civil War(s) and Dickinson Manuscript Book Reconstructions,” Deconstructed,” Dickinson’s Fascicles, 136. 28. Karen Dandurand, “New Dickinson Civil War Publications,” American Literature 56 (1984): 19. 29. Emily to Austin Dickinson, October 1, 1851, The Letters of Emily Dickinson, L 53, 139; John Shoptaw, “Dickinson’s Civil War Poetics: From the Enrollment Act to the Lincoln Assassination,” Emily Dickinson Journal 19 (2010), 9–11. 30. Wolosky, Emily Dickinson, 102. 31. Miller, Reading in Time, 155. Martha Nell Smith, however, notes that members of Dickinson’s extended family served on both sides in the war, a fact that may suggest how any reading of Dickinson is partial and provisional. See “Civil War(s),” 137–38. 32. Hoffman, “Emily Dickinson and the Limit of War,” 5–6. 33. Nineteenth-century New Englanders harvested hay, often considered the most important crop, “from mid July to mid August,” a period coincident with the Union victory at Gettysburg. See William Baron and Anne Bridges, “Making Hay in Northern New England: Maine as a Case Study, 1800–1850,” Agricultural History 57 (1983): 172. http://www.jstor. org/stable/pdf/3743154.pdf?acceptTC=true&jpdConfirm=true (accessed August 7, 2015). 34. Barrett, To Fight Aloud, 174–77. 35. Among the earliest and most powerful statements of this position are Adrienne Rich’s “Vesuvius at Home,” originally published in Parnassus 5 (1976), and reprinted in Critical Essays on Emily Dickinson, ed. Paul Ferlazzo (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1984), 187–88; Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar’s, The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-­Century Literary Imagination (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979), 608–10; and Cristanne Miller’s, “How ‘Low Feet’ Stagger: Disruptions of Language in Dickinson’s Poetry,” Feminist Critics Read Emily Dickinson, ed. Suzanne Juhasz (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1983), 146. For a recent review of criticism on Fr 764, see Susan Stewart’s “On ED’s 754/764,” New Literary History 45 (2014): 253–70. 36. Nancy Mayer, “Reloading that Gun: Reading an Old Poem as if it Matters,” Hudson Review 57 (2005): 544. 37. Letters of Emily Dickinson, Letter 280, 423.

Index1

A Abbott, S. C., 225 Agamben, Giorgio, 9n2 Allan, John, 116 American Copyright Club, 112 Andrews, William, 157, 171n28 B Bachelder, J. B., 226 Baker, Houston, 133, 135, 157, 168n2, 174n54 Banks, Nathaniel, 189 Barber, Francis, 206, 215n39 Barnard, Daniel, 88 Barrett, Faith, 219, 245 Bartley, William, 204, 215n37 Baudelaire, Charles, 5, 21–23, 25, 27, 28, 30, 31, 82, 105, 219

Baudelaire (works) Les fleurs du mal, 22 Beecher, Lyman, 62 Beidelman, George, 226 Benjamin, Walter, 1–8, 8n1, 13, 15–38, 40n8, 40–41n10, 41n16, 42n20, 43n24, 43n26, 44n27, 44n30, 44n32, 48, 50, 57–59, 68, 79–82, 89, 102, 104, 105, 117, 119, 120, 131, 132, 136, 141, 153, 156, 157, 176, 179–183, 185, 191, 192, 198, 210n4, 217–219, 221, 225, 228, 229, 231–233, 235–238, 242, 246 Benjamin (critical terms) allegory, 2, 7, 21, 25–27, 30, 38, 102, 120, 132, 180, 181, 191, 217, 221, 238, 246 constellation, 7, 23, 29, 33, 42n20, 81, 217, 228, 233

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

1

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 J. Fichtelberg, Exceptional Violence and the Crisis of Classic American Literature, American Literature Readings in the 21st Century, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-07845-3

253

254 

INDEX

Benjamin (cont.) dialectical image, 89, 153, 156, 210n4, 218, 228 facies hippocratica, 221, 237 flâneur, 31–33, 105 fourfold method, 3, 21, 28, 34, 38, 157, 231 mythic law, 24, 29, 30, 141 symbol, 26, 180, 221 Benjamin (works) The Arcades Project, 3, 21, 28, 29, 33, 34, 43n24, 44n32 “Critique of Violence,” 2, 17, 23, 25, 27, 29, 41n16, 43n26, 48, 182, 242 “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire,” 30, 117 “On the Concept of History,” 3, 34, 79, 153 One-Way Street, 33 The Origin of German Tragic Drama, 3, 7, 18, 25, 40n10, 44n27, 132, 221, 233 “The Paris of the Second Empire in Baudelaire,” 119, 129n61 “The Task of the Translator,” 25 Benton, Lauren, 194 Bibb, Henry, 1, 38, 142, 143, 145–147, 150, 166–168 Biddle, Nicholas, 89 Bierce, Ambrose, 227–229, 236 Bismarck, Otto von, 18 Black, Leonard, 143, 158, 159 Blackbourn, David, 18, 41n12 Blassingame, John, 151 Bloch, Ernst, 31 Bolling, Philip, 92 Bonaparte, Louis-Napoléon, 22, 23 Bowles, Samuel, 191 Boyd, Cyrus, 228 Braddock, Edward, 92 Briggs, Charles, 111

Broadway Journal, 4, 89–91, 109, 111, 114, 116, 122, 128n54 Brodnax, William, 84, 88 Brooke, John, 51, 71n5, 71n7, 75n40 Brooks, Daphne, 137, 157, 170n14 Brooks, Preston, 181 Brown, Albert, 184 Brown, Bergun, 228 Brown, Charles Brockden, 117, 120, 122 Edgar Huntly, 117, 120, 122 Brown, John, 182, 213n18, 223, 229 Brown, William Wells, 141, 142, 144, 149, 150, 170n21 Browne, J. Ross, 100 Bruner, Peter, 142, 147, 150, 171n21 Bryant, William Cullen, 112 Buck-Morss, Susan, 8n1, 29, 42n20 Burnap, Rev. G. W., 88 Burton’s Gentleman’s Magazine, 89, 103 Butler, Judith, 138 C Cabot, J. E., 230 Calhoun, John, 66, 82–84, 88 Exposition and Protest, 82, 83 Cameron, Sharon, 220, 240, 251n27 Campbell, Israel, 141, 143, 144, 147, 150, 162 Capps, Jack, 232 Carby, Hazel, 158 Carceral landscape, 92 Carpenter, Davis, 188 Caruth, Cathy, 134, 169n7 Cass, Lewis, 183, 184, 188, 191 Castiglia, Christopher, 65, 76n41, 209n2 Cavaignac, Louis Eugène, 22, 42n21 Chartism, 17 Chase, Richard, 177, 209n2 Child, Lydia Maria, 139, 140, 147, 172n34

 INDEX 

Clarke, Lewis, 139, 140, 150, 162 Clay, Henry, 67, 83, 181–183 Clemm, Maria, 81 Clingman, Thomas, 183 Cody, David, 219 Cole, Thomas, 7, 123, 218, 224–226, 233, 236, 245 Conron, John, 249n11 Cope, Sir John, 207 Cover, Robert, 183 Cuba “Africanization” of, 190 Black Warrior, 189 coup attempt, 190, 213n21 emancipados, 189 Ostend Manifesto, 189, 190 Curtis, George William, 202, 203 D Danton, Georges, 14, 15 Daudet, Léon, 29, 32 Davis, Theodore, 226, 227 Davis, Thomas, 187 Dayton, William, 110 Dean, Ezra, 87, 111 Dean, Gilbert, 188 Delamare, Nicolas, 52 Delano, Amasa, 6, 7, 176–179, 181, 191–208, 209n2 Narrative of Voyages and Travels, 214n23 DeLombard, Jeannine, 137, 178–180 Derrida, Jacques, 154–156, 168n3, 179 Derrida (works) Of Grammatology, 168n3 “Violence and Metaphysics,” 154 Desmoulins, Camille, 15 Detaille, Jean Baptiste Édouard, 227 Dew, Thomas R., 94 Dewey, John, 55, 63

255

Dickinson, Austin, 7, 8, 38, 227, 228, 232 Dickinson, Edward, 228, 239 Dickinson, Emily, 1, 3, 7, 217–247 poems; 1404, 236; 195, 242; 1176, 239; 103, 231; 224, 234, 236; 318, 236; 342, 240, 241; 343, 240, 241; 319, 239, 241; 320, 240; 321, 238; 326, 236; 580, 237, 242; 581, 242, 244; 582, 242; 584, 242, 244; 539, 236, 237; 764, 8, 245, 246; 765, 245, 246; 796, 235, 236 Disciplinary excess, 12, 13, 15, 16, 19, 22, 23, 31, 34, 36, 105, 145 Dodd, James, 35, 153, 179 Doddridge, Philip, 83, 84 Douglas, Mary, 55 Douglas, Stephen, 184, 191 Douglass, Frederick, 137, 139, 146–149 Dubber, Markus, 52 Du Bois, W. E. B., 133 Duyckinck, Evert, 109, 111–113 E Eaglestone, Robert, 153, 155, 173n46 Ebert, Friedrich, 18 Eimi, C. Wilkins, 114 Eliot, Thomas, 185 Elkins, Stanley, 151, 157 Embury, Emma, 100 Ernest, John, 158 Evans, J. Topham, 100 Everett, Edward, 191 F Farley, E. Wilder, 183 Faust, Drew Gilpin, 218 Ficklin, Orlando, 111

256 

INDEX

Fields, James T., 222, 243 Floyd, George, 11 Follen, Eliza, 147 Ford, Lacy, 60 Foster, Ephraim, 110 Foucault, Michel, 52 Freeburg, Christopher, 178–180, 211n6 Frémont, John, 228 Freud, Sigmund, 134–136, 139 Beyond the Pleasure Principle, 134, 135 Moses and Monotheism, 134 Nachträglikchkeit, 134, 135 Fried, Michael, 199 Fungibility, 6, 141–143, 158, 159 Fuseli, Henry, 106 G Garrison, William Lloyd, 62, 63, 167 Gates, Henry Louis, 137, 157 Gates, Paul, 182 Gaynor, Jennifer, 195, 196 Genovese, Eugene, 60, 159 Georgia, 62, 66, 85–87, 183 Indian Removal, 50 Gerstle, Gary, 53, 64, 68 Giddings, Joshua, 111 Gikandi, Simon, 158 Gilbert, Susan, 232 Gilloch, Graeme, 233 Gilroy, Paul, 5, 132–134, 156, 158, 178 Ginzberg, Lori, 63, 64 Goode, William, 184, 188 Graham’s Magazine, 4, 89, 99, 102, 119 Gramsci, Antonio, 2, 15, 16, 23 Grant, Anne, 93 Green, Jacob, 144, 147, 150, 162, 163 Green, William, 147, 148 Grimes, William, 143–145, 147–149, 162, 164, 165

H Habermas, Jürgen, 14, 56 Harper, William, 59, 223 Harris, Wiley, 186 Hartman, Saidiya, 137, 138, 141, 158 Haussmann, Georges-Eugène, 32, 33, 54 Hawks, Francis, 112 Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 229 Hazzard, W. W., 61 Hegel, Georg Friedrich, 132, 135, 138, 148, 153 Heller-Roazen, Daniel, 195, 208 Henig, Ruth, 18 Henry, William Seaton, 110 Hiester, Isaac, 188 Higginson, Thomas Wentworth, 221–224, 227, 229, 230, 232, 239, 241, 247 “A Night in the Water,” 229 “Snow,” 221, 222 Hitler, Adolph, 19, 20 Hobbes, Thomas, 41n10, 178 Hoffman, Tyler, 243 Holland, Edwin C., 59 Holmes, Oliver Wendell, Sr., 230, 239 Homer, Winslow, 204, 226 Hopkins, Owen, 226 Horne, Richard Henry, 119 Howe, Julia Ward, 218, 224, 242 Hudson River school, 7, 218, 251n23 Hugo, Victor, 30, 32 Hume, David, 56 I Infinitation, 55, 57, 58, 63, 66, 87, 113, 158 Ingraham, Joseph Holt, 94, 95, 97 Ingraham, Sarah, 64 Internal police, 1, 3, 4, 7, 48, 49, 51, 53–57, 60, 61, 63, 65, 66, 68, 82, 85, 90, 91, 95, 100, 104, 175, 212n11

 INDEX 

J Jackson, Andrew, 66, 67, 82, 83, 85, 86, 89, 90, 97 Indian removal, 66 Nullification, 67 Jackson, John Andrew, 150, 159, 160, 162 Jacobs, Harriet, 139, 142 Jacobson, Arthur, 54, 58 Jay, Nancy, 55 Johnson, Walter, 61, 92, 151–154 Jones, Samuel, 182, 212n11 K Kansas constitutions, 181 land claims, 186 Senate Committee on Territories, 181, 185 Kant, Immanuel, 27, 135 Kant (works) Critique of the Power of Judgment, 135 Kaplan, Amy, 68, 76n41 Kaplan, Michael, 17 Keckley, Elizabeth, 151 Kendall, George, 110 Kristeva, Julia, 164 L Lacan, Jacques, 16 Laclau, Ernesto, 2, 15–18, 20, 27–29, 31, 32, 34, 49, 50, 195 Laclau (critical terms) equivalential chain, 16, 27, 29, 50 hegemony, 2, 15–17, 29, 49, 195 Laclau (works) Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, 15 On Populist Reason, 16, 17, 49 Laub, Dori, 134

257

Laurens, Edward, 61 Lawrence, Amos, 182, 212n11 Lee, Maurice, 178 Lefort, Claude, 2, 3, 6, 12–16, 18–20, 25, 29–31, 33, 45, 47, 48, 70, 176, 199 Lefort (critical terms) empty place, 2, 12–16, 19, 20, 29, 31 regime, 2, 3, 6, 13, 20, 33, 45, 47 Levi, Primo, 136 Levinas, Emmanuel, 6, 133, 153–157, 164, 165, 173n46 Levinas, Emmanuel (works) Otherwise than Being, 133, 155, 157 “Substitution,” 155 Totality and Infinity, 154 Leys, Ruth, 134 Liebknecht, Karl, 18 Locke, John, 65 Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth, 119, 120 Louis Philippe I, 22 Lowell, James Russell, 109 Luciano, Dana, 179 Lukács, Georg, 5, 27, 28, 32, 154 Lukács (works) History and Class Consciousness, 5, 27 Luxemburg, Rosa, 18 Lynch, William, 95, 96, 114 M Machiavelli, Niccolò, 178 Madison, James, 34, 53, 56, 57, 122 Madison (works) Federalist No. 10, 34 Federalist No. 38, 57, 122 Federalist No. 40, 57 “Notes on Government”, 57 Manheim, Daniel, 219, 231 Mann, Michael, 51–53

258 

INDEX

Marchart, Oliver, 16 Marshall, John, 85, 86, 92 Cherokee Nation v. Georgia (1831), 85 Worcester v. Georgia (1832), 85 Marx, Karl, 2, 22, 23, 27, 31, 32, 76n41, 145, 202 Marx (works) Capital, 202 Mason, Isaac, 147, 148, 160, 163 Mathews, Cornelius, 111, 112 Matthiessen, F. O., 80, 177, 209n2 American Renaissance, 80, 209n2 The Heart of Europe, 209n2 Mayer, Nancy, 246 McCoy, Alfred, 68 McGill, Meredith, 112 Melville, Herman, 1, 3, 6, 7, 38, 114, 175–182, 187, 189–199, 202–205, 207, 208, 209n2, 211n9, 212n16, 213n21 Melville (works) “Bartleby”, 196, 197 “Benito Cereno”, 6, 175–208 “The Encantadas”, 196 Mardi, 196 Moby Dick, 191, 196 Typee, 191 White Jacket, 191 Mercer, Charles, 92 Miller, Angela, 224, 225 Miller, Cristanne, 242 Montesquieu, Charles de Secondat, Baron de, 56 Morehead, James, 111 Morris, George, 111 Morris, Robert, 56 Morris, Thomas, 59 Morrison, Toni, 131, 133, 134, 168 Mouffe, Chantal, 2, 15, 16, 18, 49, 195 Mouffe (works) Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, 15

N Nast, Thomas, 68, 69 Naylor, William, 92 Nichols, R. S., 101 Novak, William, 52–54 Noyes, George, 228 Nullification controversy (1832), 67 O Olney, James, 157 O’Sullivan, John, 109–112 Owen, Robert, 111 P Panic of 1837, 3, 4, 50, 67 Pennington, James, 142, 143 Pensky, Max, 233 Pezuela, Juan de la, 189, 190 Phantasmagoria, 104 Phelps, Elizabeth Stuart, 243 Picturesque, the, 7, 217–247 Pierce, Franklin, 182, 189, 190 Piersol, Agnes, 100, 103 Pintó, Ramón, 190 Plenum, 54, 58, 60, 62, 66, 91, 92, 94, 99, 100, 106, 110, 119, 134, 136, 138, 157–160, 175, 176, 192, 200, 223 Poe, Edgar Allan, 1, 3–5, 30–32, 35, 38, 79–123, 131, 219 bankruptcy of, 5, 81, 90, 109 Poe, Virginia Eliza Clemm, 109 Poe (works) “Al Aaraaf”, 109 “The Assignation”, 103, 104, 106, 117 “Berenice”, 97, 98, 102 “The Business Man”, 115 “The Conversation of Eiros and Charmion”, 4, 103

 INDEX 

“A Descent into the Maelstrom”, 4, 103, 106 “The Domain of Arnheim”, 122 “Eleonora”, 117, 118, 123 Eureka, 80 “The Fall of the House of Usher”, 4, 105, 106 “Four Beasts in One”, 97 Grant, Anne, Memoirs of an American Lady (review), 93 “Hans Phaal–A Tale”, 4, 97 Horne, R. H., Orion (review), 119 “How to Write a Blackwood Article”, 115 Ingraham, Joseph Holt, The South-West (review), 94 “The Island of the Fay”, 118 “King Pest the First”, 4, 97 “The Landscape Garden”, 122 “Letter to B—”, 80 “Life in Death”, 102–104 “Ligeia”, 4, 103, 104, 106, 117 “The Literary Life of Thingum Bob, Esq.”, 115 Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth, Ballads and Other Poems (review), 119, 120 “Loss of Breath”, 4, 98, 120 “Maelzel’s Chess Player”, 79, 80, 90, 95 “The Man of the Crowd”, 30, 105, 108, 122 “The Man That was Used Up”, 115, 120 “Morella”, 97, 98 “The Murders in the Rue Morgue”, 107 “The Pit and the Pendulum”, 116, 117 “The Raven”, 109 reviews, 4, 90, 91, 111, 112, 119, 120

259

“Shadow—A Parable”, 118 Sigourney, Lydia Huntley, Zinzendorff, and Other Poems (review), 95 “Some Passages in the Life of a Lion”, 115 “A Tale of the Ragged Mountains”, 5, 116, 120, 121 Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque, 103 Police science, 48, 52–54 Preston, William, 88 Price, Martin, 224, 225 Protests (2020) Lansing, Michigan, 11 Portland, Oregon, 11, 12 Q Quitman, John, 190 R Raeff, Marc, 52 Randolph, John, 83 Rathbun, George, 110 Rathenau, Walther, 18 Reddie, James, 194 Reed, Charles Wellington, 226 Reification, 5, 7, 27, 28, 32, 34, 38, 120, 132, 154, 192, 221 Roach, Joseph, 92 Roberts, Alasdair, 88 Robespierre, Maximillien, 14, 15 Rogers, Sion, 185 Roosevelt, Franklin Delano, 68 Roper, Moses, 1, 38, 150–152, 161, 162 Rozas, Juan de, 193 Ruskin, John, 232–234

260 

INDEX

S Saez, Ñacuñán, 137, 139, 170n11 St. John, Henry, Viscount of Bolingbroke, 56 Scarry, Elaine, 135, 136, 143, 169n8, 170n10 Schell, J. H., 226, 227 Schmitt, Carl, 2, 3, 8–9n2, 13, 17–21, 24–26, 28, 30, 34, 36, 38, 40–41n10, 41n11, 41n16, 42n18, 42n19, 218, 231 Schmitt (works) Concept of the Political, The, 17, 21, 42n19 Constitutional Theory, 17 Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy, The, 17 Dictatorship, 17, 19, 40n10, 41n16 Legality and Legitimacy, 17, 42n18 Political Romanticism, 19 Political Theology, 17, 19 Sekora, John, 157 Shaw, Lemuel, 58, 59, 63, 187, 202 Shaw (decisions), 58 Commonwealth of Massachusetts v. Alger (1851), 58 Shoptaw, John, 239 Sigourney, Lydia Huntley, 95, 96 Silverman, Kenneth, 116 Simms, William Gilmore, 95, 111 Sims, Thomas, 187 Slidell, John, 189, 190 Smith, Adam, 34, 149, 162, 164, 165, 172n34 Smith, Benjamin, 226 Smith, James (ex-slave narrator), 150, 162, 164 Smith, James McCune, 139 Sorel, Georges, 24 Sorel (works) Reflections on Violence, 24 Soulé, Pierre, 189

Southern Literary Messenger, 79, 89, 91, 94, 99, 103, 123n1 State of exception, 2, 6, 13, 17, 19, 20, 23, 25, 26, 28, 34, 35, 37, 43n26, 56, 67, 82–85, 87, 95, 107, 136, 176, 180–182, 187, 188, 191, 201, 207 Steadman, John, 144 Steward, Austin, 163 Stewart, Tertullus D., 202 Stone, John Augustus, 98 Stowe, Harriet Beecher, 64, 147 Stroyer, Jacob, 150 Summers, George, 84 Sumner, Charles, 181 Sundquist, Eric, 177, 192, 210n3 Sweet, Timothy, 227, 250–251n16 T Tappan, Lewis, 139 Taylor, John, 128n53, 184, 186, 187 Taylor, Nathaniel, 186 Taylor, Robert, 83 Texas, 3, 67, 87, 88, 90, 91, 108–115, 118, 121 annexation, 3, 67, 87, 90, 91, 108, 109, 121 Thomas, Frederick, 109 Thomson, Janice, 193, 194 Thoreau, Henry David, 222, 246 Tocqueville, Alexis de, 46–50, 52, 70n1 Tocqueville (works) Democracy in America, 70n1 Tomlins, Christopher, 52, 54 Toucey, Isaac, 184 Trauma, 5, 7, 13, 30, 32, 38, 55, 90, 120, 131–136, 153, 155–158, 160–162, 165, 168–169n4, 180, 218, 219, 223, 224, 229 Trier, Lars von, 103

 INDEX 

Truesdell, Matthew, 23, 43n22 Truman, Harry, 68, 77n44 Turner, J. M. W., 232, 233 Turner, Nat, 3, 4, 50, 59, 61, 66, 84, 89, 90, 94, 95, 97, 108 U Upshur, Abel, 83 V Van Buren, Martin, 88 Vesey, Denmark, 59, 61, 74n24 Virginia, 4, 53, 57, 61, 65, 66, 82–84, 90–92, 94, 95, 97, 99, 101, 109, 115, 118, 121, 123, 150, 186 constitutional convention (1829-30), 65 emancipation debate (1831-32), 92, 94, 99 W Washington, George, 92 Watts, Dale, 185 Waud, Alfred, 226, 227, 236 Weber, Max, 27 Weimar Republic, 2, 17, 21, 24, 41n12

261

Weld, Theodore, 63, 75n38, 150, 151 Weller, John, 184 Whalen, Terence, 80, 123n2 White, Thomas, 4, 73n13, 91–97, 99, 104 Whitman, Walt, 206 Wilentz, Sean, 51, 70n3, 71n4 Willis, Nathaniel P., 90, 111, 225, 241, 251n16 Wilson, Woodrow, 68, 77n43 Winterfield, Charles, 114, 129n57 Winthrop, Theodore, 230, 231, 236 Wirt, William, 85, 92 Wolosky, Shira, 219, 242 Wood, Marcus, 144, 145, 149, 171n30 Wright, David, 63, 75n37 Y Yancey, William, 87 Yar, Majid, 154, 173n48 Young, Mary, 85, 90, 109, 111–115, 119, 121 Young, Michael, 63, 64, 74n34, 75n38 Z Zwarg, Christina, 120