“Let man keep his many parts…”: On Melville, Ellison, and CLR James.

(Note: This piece was originally a paper I wrote for a lit course on Ralph Ellison I attended while in grad school, hence the fidelity to MLA citations. I present it here with some edits.)

When considering the issues surrounding the matter of literary inheritance, the writer’s process of interpretation coupled with creative application stands out as especially interesting and complex.  When a writer is influenced by another writer, they bring their understanding or interpretation of a text to the task of the creative process.  The demands of the writer’s particular project (which can be in part determined by their literary influences) govern how an influence is incorporated into a new composition, and how an influence functions as a literary device that signifies to the reader.  The procedure is never neutral or arbitrary.  The challenges adjacent to the puzzle of influence can seem especially urgent when a writer engages essential ethical, moral, and political questions and themes.  The black American author Ralph Ellison, most famous for the only novel he published in his lifetime, Invisible Man (1952), was particularly invested in the related issues of American identity, race relations, and citizenship, and he understood his project to be in line with the “continuity of moral purpose” that centered the nineteenth century American literary classics.  He was attracted to the works of Herman Melville especially, and Invisible Man is peppered with allusions to Melville’s works, and many other writers as well.  The most explicit reference to Melville comes even before the narrative proper commences; a quotation from Melville’s novella Benito Cereno (1855)serves as the epigraph (along with a quote from T.S. Eliot) to Ellison’s novel.  It is a line of dialogue, spoken by the protagonist Amasa Delano, the captain of an American merchant ship, to the traumatized titular character near the end of the narrative: “’You are saved,’ cried Captain Delano,  more and more astonished and pained; ‘you are saved: what has cast such a shadow upon you?’”  The answer, not given in the epigraph, is, of course, “the negro.”  Benito Cereno is in essence a story about the moral evil of New World slavery, and Ellison’s decision to utilize a quote from that work as an epigraph announces from the outset that one of the chief themes of his novel will be the legacy of that moral evil and the challenge that legacy poses in modern American life and American identity.  In fact, I would argue that the question of American identity is of central importance to Invisible Man, and that the position Ellison takes on the matter is an affirmation of the founding principles supplemented by a greater commitment to cultural pluralism.  Ellison rejects the legitimacy of class and race-centered ideological critiques of “the principle” of American citizenship, while also challenging the pervasive racism characteristic of American cultural life by troubling the centrality of whiteness in the wider national dialogue.  A creative engagement with the works of Melville generally and Benito Cereno specifically at least partially informs Ellison’s cultural commentary and his novelistic aesthetic. 

           

Another writer of African ancestry roughly contemporaneous with Ellison was the Trinidadian cultural critic C.L.R. James, who was similarly admiring of Melville’s work.  Although James demonstrated aptitude, and even mastery, in multiple forms, including fiction and poetry, his most overt engagement with Melville came in the form of literary and cultural criticism.  In 1953, the same year Invisible Man won the National Book Award, James  published the book-length study of Melville entitled Mariners, Renegades and Castaways: The Story of Herman Melville and the World We Live In.  It was a study, as implied by the title, with an explicitly political dimension.  At the time James was writing his book on Melville he faced deportation from the United States courtesy of the Immigration and Naturalization Services (Pease viii).  The motivation for this punitive move was James’s “subversive” political activities, and the justification was the McCarran Act, a piece of Cold War-inspired legislation that gave the federal government more powers concerning the monitoring, detainment, and deportation of political subversives, often understood to be synonymous with communists (Pease xxv).  Although James addresses multiple works in Melville’s oeuvre, including Benito Cereno, he focuses most of his attention on Moby-Dick.  The crux of his critique begins with the familiar assertion that the megalomaniacal Captain Ahab represents a totalitarian type, but James eschews the then-standard critical line that Ishmael represents the democratic opposition to authoritarianism (an untenable view since Ishmael explicitly identifies with Ahab’s quest to slay the white whale) and instead insists on the heroic centrality of the Pequod’s diverse crew (who also identify with Ahab’s quest but exhibit moral potential beyond it).  This analytical gesture reflects James’s then-current political and legal situation; he wished to protest the state mechanisms that denied him both citizenship and due process, and he did so by reformulating the concept of citizenship in the American cultural milieu.  For James, a critical reading of Melville allowed him to rethink race and nation and articulate a post-national and transnational conception of citizenship.  James is less inclined than Ellison to affirm American exceptionalism, and his sensibility is much less individualistic, but it is quite remarkable that Melville served as an intellectual ‘in’ for both writers to approach questions surrounding American race relations and national identity in the context of the Cold War.  I would like to argue that both Ralph Ellison and C.L.R. James used the works of Herman Melville, most notably Benito Cereno and Moby-Dick to interrogate the concept of American citizenship, especially as it pertained to race, but that each writer, owing to somewhat different ideological orientations, arrived at markedly different creative social visions which nonetheless had some intriguing points of overlap.  In the case of Ellison, the aspiration was a more inclusive, pluralistic American identity buttressed by the doctrine of American exceptionalism and the supremacy of the American creed, while James gestured towards a transnationalism that eschewed the telos of a nation state-oriented identity.  For Ellison, pluralistic multi-nationalism served as the raw material for a revised American identity, while for James American identity could potentially serve as a starting point for an enlightened world citizenship beyond nation; but first, the contradictions needed to be engaged, and the writings of Melville served as exemplary conceptual aids to think through the pertinent issues.   

The Picture Desk Ltd Rebel slave on a slave ship

            One of the more noteworthy analyses of the kinship between Benito Cereno and Invisible Man is the essay “The Variations on a Masked Leader: A Study on the Literary Relationship of Ralph Ellison and Herman Melville” by Stuart E. Omans.  Omans is more interested in identifying the myriad ways Benito Cereno manifests itself in Ellison’s novel than in connecting it to a single theme or idea; this is perfectly legitimate of course, since Ellison would seem to wish to keep his acquired literary material flexible and thematically fluid.  “He [Ellison] has carefully reworked, varied, and remolded Melville’s themes so that they finally become a unique part of his own creation” (Omans 15).  However, interested critics could perhaps narrow their focus in order to link Benito Cereno to Invisible Man’s sense of American citizenship.  The antagonist (not necessarily the villain- critical interpretations are legion) of Benito Cereno is Babo, the leader of an African slave revolt aboard the Spanish slave ship San Dominick in the later part of the eighteenth century.  After the failure of the revolt, Babo is captured, tried, and executed by Spanish authorities in Peru.  The description of the legal proceedings is quite revealing: “Seeing all was over, he uttered no sound, and could not be forced to.  His aspect seemed to say, since I cannot do deeds, I will not speak words…  On the testimony of the sailors alone rested the legal identity of Babo” (Melville 315).  The “legal identity” being referred to here is in accordance with Spanish law of the period, which, unsurprisingly, did not grant the slave Babo anything by the way of legal rights, autonomy, or self-definition.  In the absence of legal rights, the authority of the state over the individual can be said to lack legitimacy, and this condition tends to create a potent sense of alienation and rage in the person whose rights are not recognized.  In Lima, Peru (the destination of the San Dominick) Babo would have the social status of a slave; his solution is to secure his freedom through violent rebellion and return to Africa with his fellow freed captives.  An attempted change in social status is pursued through action.  When the mechanisms of the enslaving state prevail, Babo performs his citizenship in accordance with its underlying logic.  He is voiceless and inert, robbed of the right to self-definition and agency.  The unnamed protagonist of Invisible Man (whom I will refer to as “Invisible Man”) experiences a set of conditions that are not identical to those experienced by Babo, but are clearly related both historically and structurally to similar cultural factors (racism, most obviously) and force similar challenges to his identity, social status, and sense of self-worth.  As Omans observes, “Constantly Ellison looks to Melville for his views concerning the democratic American experience but particularly for his searching portrayal of the Negro’s implications within that experience” (16).  The experiences of Invisible Man are more multifaceted than Babo’s, or indeed, any of the characters’ in Benito Cereno.  Invisible Man is a much longer work with a more epic and expansive scope, so the range of citizenship possibilities presented is much wider.  Invisible Man experiences, and comes to reject, both the racialized social hierarchy of the Jim Crow South, the materialist internationalism and more subtle racism of a thinly-disguised communist party, and the apocalyptic exhortations of Black Nationalism (If Melville had granted Babo the opportunity or inclination to speak at length about his experiences or views, he may have sounded much like Ras the Exhorter.).  Ultimately, Invisible Man is left dejected and alienated by his experiences, and his alienation is articulated through the apt metaphor of invisibility.  When pondering the sense of self he has cultivated over the course of his experiences near the end of the novel, Invisible Man recalls his grandfather’s enigmatic advice and links it to a social and political identity- “I’m still plagued by his [grandfather’s] deathbed advice… Perhaps he hid his meaning deeper than I thought… Could he have meant- hell, he must have meant the principle, that we were to affirm the principle on which the country was built and not the men…”  He goes on: “Whence all this passion toward conformity anyway? – diversity is the word.  Let man keep his many parts and you’ll have no tyrant states…  America is woven of many strands; I would recognize them and let it so remain… Our fate is to become one, and yet many” (Ellison 574 and 577).  This is he foundational political principle of the United States harmonized with a pluralistic conception of American cultural and social life, an aspirational condition that is the closest Invisible Man comes to a foundation for a secure identity. Tellingly, this position comes in the form of a creative utterance, and invisibility is mitigated through the discovery of a coherent artistic voice. 

            The self-originating quality of this voice is of central importance, and again Ellison engages Melville’s novella as a means to represent its development and eventual articulation.  The phrase “Follow your leader” recurs throughout Benito Cereno, being the words written on the bow of the slave ship by Babo after the initial and short-lived success of the rebellion.  Leadership and social power are manipulated by Melville in Benito Cereno to create ambivalent and disquieting effects. Throughout the story, Babo forces Don Benito to make a show of being in charge in order to deceive Captain Delano.  Captain Delano, for his part, is incapable of seeing Babo as a possible, credible figure of authority because of his slave status; Babo effectively utilizes his invisibility to his own advantage.  The instability of social power and its relation to identity is explored by Ellison through an engagement with Melville’s text.  “Ralph Ellison was so affected by the implications of the phrase [“Follow your leader”] that he revised it to become a repetitive note in his own hero’s search for identity.  It became, in fact, the major theme of Invisible Man…  Nearly every character in the novel claims to be the protagonist’s leader” (Omans 17).  All of these claims turn out to have a cumulative deleterious effect on the protagonist, of course.  A preacher at one point tries to uphold the authority of the corrupt and draconian Negro university president Dr. Bledsoe, the man who leads a system representative of Booker T. Washington-style racial reform.  The preacher utilizes especially fulsome language: “For has not your present leader become his living agent, his physical presence?  Look about you if you doubt it…  How can I tell you what manner of man this is who leads you?”  (Ellison 132) Bledsoe, of course, betrays Invisible Man and reveals himself to be a morally bankrupt and self-interested little Caesar.  A similar pattern holds for other would-be political and spiritual leaders the protagonist encounters.  Following one’s leader proves to be a consistently unfulfilling and occasionally dangerous business.  As Omans observed, “The boy searches for some stable force throughout the book to lead him to freedom, or visibility.  In his attempt to find a visible identity he at first wishes to follow an outside force, to have his identity defined for him by others” (17).  The motif of “leadership” is an echo of an aspect of the earlier Melville work, one Ellison, as an admirer of jazz music, appropriates as a theme on which he can riff in several different variations. 

            The dominant theme of invisibility generates much ambiguity in Ellison’s novel, particularly in the arena of social relations.  Invisibility and obscuration occur in multiple forms, and masking is one of them.  Symbolic masks are featured throughout Benito Cereno as well.  The San Dominick has a stern-piece that Melville likens to “a dark satyr in a mask, holding his foot on the prostrate neck of a writhing figure, likewise masked” (qtd. in Omans 18-19).  This is clearly a symbolic representation and a foreshadowing of the deceptive pose adopted by Benito Cereno and Babo during Delano’s visit on the ship.  It is a social mask crafted out of the violence of slavery.  Similarly, socially masked figures appear in Invisible Man.  As the critic Valerie Bonita Gray observed, “Babo, Bledsoe, and [Invisible Man’s] grandfather are all black characters who wear masks.  In order to function in the white world in which they find themselves, they recognize the need to hide their real selves” (37).  Masking can become a habit, and soon enough one which assists the condition of total invisibility.  Of course, masks are not intrinsically limiting throughout Invisible Man.  The memorable episode near the end of the novel where the narrator acquires a pair of dark sunglasses and wanders around Harlem and is routinely mistaken for a man named Rinehart is probably the best example of a potentially empowering mask.  Although Invisible Man is initially ambivalent about being mistaken for somebody else, he eventually comes to see in Rinehart an expansive world of possibilities.  The ambivalence at the beginning emerges from the lack of social stability intrinsic to the process of masking.  Invisible Man muses, “Perhaps I’m out of his territory at last, I thought and began trying to place Rinehart in the scheme of things.  He’s been around all the while, but I have been looking in another direction… What on earth was hiding behind the face of things?  If dark glasses and a white hat could blot out my identity so quickly, who actually was who?” (Ellison 493) Masking has the disquieting potential to obscure identity to the point that it becomes doubtful that there is any “real” self at all.  In this conception, social performance is such a powerful, potent, oppressive force that self-definition is all but impossible, and stability and a sense of certainty regarding the self and one’s relation to others is all but obliterated.  However, this uncertainty and fear concerning Rinehart does not remain with the protagonist for long.  He begins to see the possibilities in Rinehart’s protean social presence, and how a multiplicity of masks may overcome the limitations of a singular, imposed mask.  Rinehart is still a condition of invisibility, but he is the one manifestation of invisibility that is something other than tragic and disempowering.  The narrator concludes, “Can it be I thought, can it actually be?  And I knew that it was… could he be all of them: Rine the Runner and Rine the gambler and Rine the briber and Rine the lover and Rinehart the Reverend?…  What is real anyway?…  His world was possibility and he knew it.  He was years ahead of me and I was a fool… The world in which we lived was without boundaries” (Ellison 498). The mask morphs from a set of restrictive boundaries to a world of freedom and expansive possibilities once it multiplies. This empowering and multi-faceted brand of masking is not really present in Benito Cereno (Babo is temporarily granted power by his mask, but it has a somewhat singular quality), but animates another Melville text centered on a character very much like Rinehart- The Confidence-Man.  “A fraud and a trickster, Rinehart is reminiscent of Melville’s Confidence Man.  Just as the Confidence Man can be a deaf-mute, a cripple, or an agent for an orphanage, Rinehart too changes” (Gray 52).  An important difference between the two characters, however, is the nature of their roles in their respective texts.  The Confidence Man is essentially a villain whose protean qualities serve as a commentary on the corruption and rootlessness present in American society, while Rinehart more optimistically suggests a strategy for survival in an often hostile cultural landscape.  This trickster condition suggested by Rinehart opens up the possibility of agency and a viable range of identities for black Americans in the United States, although his lack of stability still leaves the protagonist with a lingering feeling of ambivalence.  He says in the epilogue of his story, “But what do I really want, I’ve asked myself.  Certainly not the freedom of a Rinehart…” (Ellison 575)  Masks may aid the development of the citizen-subject, but they cannot be an end in themselves.

            Both the works of Melville and the works of Ellison are deeply invested in the role memory plays in the creation of a political and cultural subject.  The dominant metaphor for memories of a troubled past in Benito Cereno is the shadow.  The shadow is mentioned in the quote that serves as the epitaph to Invisible Man, and given the name “negro.”  The critic James Booth is quite helpful on this point, and persuasively draws the connection to Ellison’s project: “The shadow here is cast by the memory of a slave revolt on his [Benito Cereno’s] ship, or perhaps by slavery itself.  Delano’s (characteristically American) appeal to turn away from the past expresses an optimism, and a future-directed gaze, made possible, in part, by forgetting.  Ellison, too, wrote of shadows, and in particular, ‘the shadow of the past’” (684).  Historical consciousness is no light matter in Ellison’s novel, and it is closely bound to his concept of American citizenship.  The climax of Invisible Man involves a destructive riot in Harlem instigated by the perfidious pseudo-communist organization called the Brotherhood, and largely carried out under the “leadership” of the black nationalist Ras the Exhorter, who takes on the more appropriately apocalyptic persona of Ras the Destroyer in his vengeful campaign against the racist institutions of the United States.  The episode culminates with Invisible Man experiencing a bleak vision involving his castration at the hands of Brother Jack.  The vision involves the protagonist’s confrontation with all the would-be cultural and ideological leaders that “kept him runnin’” over the course of his narrative; he asserts his right to self-determination, and Brother Jack “frees him from his illusions” in the form of a violent castration.  Invisible Man witnesses his bloody genitals flung over the river and onto a bridge.  This gesture robs the protagonist of the generative possibilities that come with the capacity to self-define, but it also unburdens him of the illusory myths that dominate the social order.  He says to his tormentors, “It’s not invisible… that there hang all my generations wasting upon the water… there’s your universe, and that drip-drop upon the water you hear is all the history you’ve made, all you’re going to make…” (Ellison 570)  The racial injustice that has been a near-constant feature in American life draws the oppressor into its twisted logic along with the oppressed; when white attempts to negate black, it establishes the conditions of its own negation.  As it pertains to history, castration is both the symbol of a denied future and a forgetting or denial of history.  White effaces black out of time and space, and from his excluded position, the protagonist can witness the destructive logic of this program.  Ellison’s project is at least in part a creative act of remembering that un-erases the black presence in American life and restores an informed historical consciousness.

            The castration scene in Invisible Man has a precedent in Melville’s Benito Cereno that Ellison may or may not have consciously drawn on for inspiration.  After Captain Delano rescues Benito Cereno, it comes to light that the sword in Cereno’s possession throughout the events of the story was a fake: “The dress, so precise and costly, worn by him on the day whose events have been narrated, had not been willingly put on.  And that silver-mounted sword, apparent symbol of despotic command, was not, indeed, a sword but the ghost of one.  The scabbard, artificially stiffened, was empty” (Melville 315).  Babo had apparently taken Cereno’s sword during the course of the rebellion, and provided a stuffed scabbard as part of his elaborate constructed façade.  This is a symbolic castration, as opposed to a castration with a symbolic significance, but like the castration in Ellison’s novel, it is closely linked to social and national status.  By taking Cereno’s sword, Babo places Cereno in a subordinate position, wearing the costume of his nation but possessing none of the real status the costume usually confers.  Earlier in the story, Babo humiliates Cereno by forcing him to receive a shave in which the Spanish flag is used as a barber’s covering.  Cereno’s symbolic castration estranges him from his national/cultural identity and the protections of citizenship, a fate Cereno himself and his associates inflicted on the abducted slaves.  Ellison clearly understood the potent effect such a metaphor could have when applied to the question of the Negro in American society, and it would seem that Melville’s example suggested some possibilities for representing such an experience.

            When C.L.R. James expressed his appreciation for the works of Herman Melville, it was in the form of a book-length study, Mariners, Renegades, & Castaways: The Story of Herman Melville and the World We Live In.  A work of criticism obviously has a different character from the novel, but James’s approach to Herman Melville and his thematic concerns intersected with Ellison’s in a number of ways.  From the introduction, James makes it clear that he wishes to place Melville in an explicitly political context:

  “The miracle of Herman Melville is this: that a hundred years ago in two novels Moby-Dick and Pierre, and two or three stories, he painted a picture of the world in which we live… the totalitarian madness which swept the world first as Nazism and now as Soviet Communism; the great mass labor movements and colonial revolts- this is the world that masses of men strive to make sense of.  This is what Melville coordinates- but not as industry, science, politics, economics or psychology, but as a world of human personalities…” (3)

Despite James’s insistence that Melville does not coordinate the troubling modern world as politics, his linking of Melville’s work to such historically important political events as the rise of Nazism and communism, as well as mass labor movements and decolonization, indicates a deep concern with the then-current political scene, one molded chiefly by the imperatives of the Cold War state.  This is the same political landscape in which Ellison was working.  For James, the personal is very much political.  He wrote his book on Melville while detained on Ellis Island and awaiting deportation.  He commented, “A great part of this book was written on Ellis Island while I was being detained by the Department of Immigration.  The Island, like Melville’s Pequod, is a miniature of all the nations and all sections of society.  My experience of it… [has] so deepened my understanding of Melville and so profoundly influenced the form this book has taken…”  (James 3) The authoritarian mechanism of the Cold War state, the paranoid atmosphere of the McCarthy era, and the vagaries of American nationalism all intensely colored James’s interpretation of Melville.  What might be the strangest aspect of his study is that it remains so persuasive despite a conspicuous tendentiousness.  James wishes to investigate the modern totalitarian social type through Melville.  Intuitively, he centers his attention on Captain Ahab of Moby-Dick.  “Ahab is no common man… he is a man who wants to live fully and completely according to his beliefs…  His basic religion for years has been the religion of his age- material progress” (James 9).  Of course, the religion of material progress brings Ahab much success and even more alienation and quasi-existential misery.  “His business becomes to reconcile the undoubted advantages of an industrial civilization with what that very civilization is doing to him as a human being” (James 10).  This struggle is not at all unlike the struggle of Ellison’s protagonist, who attempts many times to reconcile his attachment to American civilization with the deleterious effects of its racism.  Of course, Invisible Man pursues his dilemma towards a frustrated but defiant individualism, which he molds into a creative act of communication that may have the potential to mitigate the effects of invisibility.  Ahab is not so fortunate, though he has in common with Invisible Man an instinct toward individualism.  “There is a fatal flaw in his [Ahab’s] misery and his challenge and defiance.  Never for a single moment does it cross his mind to question his relations with the people he works with…  He has been trained in the school of individualism and an individualist he remains to the end” (James 11).  The alienating effects of mechanization and individualism create an untenable situation that has the potential to tip over into the genuinely authoritarian in the event of a catastrophic event that prompts men to seek radically different modes of social organization.  For Ahab, the catastrophic event is his fateful encounter with the white whale, Moby Dick.  This compels a new program of passionate, violent repudiation.  James cannot help but link this mindset to the pathological nationalisms and ideologies that proved so destructive during the first half of the twentieth century.  James views nations and nationalisms as being founded on dubious concepts of race: “This doctrine is that the national race, the national stock, the national blood, is superior to all other national races…  over the last twenty years [the doctrine] has grown stronger in every country in the world.  Who doubts this has only to read the McCarran Immigration Bill of 1952, which is permeated with the doctrine of racial superiority” (13).  Here we have race, nation, modernity, and the totalitarian type all meeting in the space of Melville’s most famous novel.  In this formulation, citizenship is not a desirable status in the least.  For James, the possible redeeming factor for this volatile and possibly tragic scenario can be found in the make-up of the Pequod’s crew. The critic Donald E. Pease wrote that James would eventually consolidate his political views into a three-part doctrine: “the rejection of the Soviet Union’s bureaucracy as a form of state capitalism, the rejection of the vanguard party, and the insistence on the relative autonomy of spontaneous social movements” (ix).  The latter is especially important when considering James’s reading of Melville.  When considering the matter of social change, James rejected the centralizing tendencies of the vanguard party and placed the emphasis on collective action.  His earlier book American Civilization brought this view to bear on America’s troubled race relations: “it… advanced the argument that various sectors- the family, the political community, the civil sphere- of American civilization were in crisis along a racial division that could only be resolved through the development of a mass revolutionary movement that would reorganize American culture on an egalitarian and participatory basis” (Pease ix-x).  The diverse, subaltern mix of Ahab’s crew can be understood as the necessary action that could be taken against the totalitarian type in incipient form.  Of course, in Melville’s novel the actual outcome is tragic, not emancipatory or triumphant.  The totalitarian type leads his social order to ruin.  However, James’s project is more one of advocacy on the crew’s behalf than an interpretation of an actual conflict in the novel.  James sees in the Pequod crew the diverse collection of marginalized individuals who could break the racist and authoritarian model of the modern nation state, if only they could see their dilemma with clarity and unity of purpose.  This renegotiation of nationality and citizenship has some similarities and differences with Ellison’s project.  Like Ellison, he values cultural pluralism, and considers America’s troubled race relations and efforts to efface pluralism through rigid racial hierarchies and impose a unitary whiteness on cultural life as major social evils.  However, Ellison wished to navigate this corrupted landscape and offer his challenge through the cultivation of a renewed brand of American exceptionalism and individualism; Ellison’s ideal America would seem to be its present diverse mix of individuals organized on the same creed but untainted by an artificial racial hierarchy centered on white supremacism.  James, by contrast, wants to be a citizen of the world, and gestures toward a transnational and post-national construction of the social subject.  Both of these writers, I feel, chose to engage with Melville because of the circumstances of their historical moment, which was dominated by the Cold War and the very recent memory of two brutal world wars.  Melville, along with Dostoevsky, was the nineteenth century writer who arguably saw the most keenly that modernity and industrialized society would not be able to eliminate the problem of evil, and in fact, the burdens of history and social alienation may be felt even more acutely in the brave new modern world.  Ellison and James, both being writers of African ancestry and deeply concerned with the problem of American racism, responded to Melville’s insights and aesthetics and deployed them in their own work to imagine new possibilities beyond the limits of the then-current sociopolitical order.

Works Cited

Booth, W. James.  “The Color of Memory: Reading Race with Ralph Ellison.”  Political Theory.

            36.5 (2008):  683-707.  Print. 

Ellison, Ralph.  Invisible Man.  New York: Vintage Books, 1995.  Print.

Gray, Valerie Bonita.  Invisible Man’s Literary Heritage: Benito Cereno and Moby Dick. 

            Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, 1978.  Print.

James, C.L.R.  Mariners, Renegades, & Castaways: The Story of Herman Melville and the World

            We Live In.  Hanover and London: University Press of New England, 2001.  Print.

Melville, Herman.  Great Short Works of Herman Melville.  New York: HarperCollins Publishers,

            2004.  Print.

Omans, Stuart E.  “The Variations of a Masked Leader: A Study on the Literary Relationship of

            Ralph Ellison and Herman Melville.”  South Atlantic Bulletin.  40.2 (1975):  15-23.  Print.

Pease, Donald E. Introduction. Mariners, Renegades, & Castaways: The Story of Herman            Melville and the World We Live In.  By C.L.R. James. 2001. Hanover and London:

            University Press of New England, 2001.  Print. 

“I Can’t Eat No More Dirt”- A Consideration of Jim Thompson’s Novel Pop. 1280

Warning- here be spoilers.

I’m not sure if this speaks to a gap in my noir fiction education (It’s quite possible that it does- I’ve never encountered Hammett or Chandler outside of one of the film adaptations of their novels.) but I generally do not associate the genre with satire, as such.  Noir would seem to embrace a mode of narration that simple folk like yours truly are fond of calling “psychological;” you know, that narrative realm of limited first-person perspective, situational ambiguity, and unreliable storytellers.  A style conducive to uncertainty, mystery, dread, and general moral dubiousness.  Satire, as I have come to understand it, may share with such literary stylistics qualities like an alienated perspective, but aside from that, a superficially panoramic view of an issue is somewhat necessary for a satirical work to really capture the curious vagaries of human folly and hypocrisy. In other words, it can’t tolerate much ambiguity. Not when it wants to be nice and scathing anyway.  Human error is socially situated, a hiccup that occurs relationally between bumbling subjects who can’t quite grasp the full dysfunctional context in which they are operating. Satire zooms out and captures that bumbling for the edification and amusement of the reader or viewer.  As I write this, I realize I am teasing out a possible similarity between the noir sensibility and the (admittedly, much broader) satirical, namely the presence of the perspective of the flawed subject (anti-hero, if you will), but I would insist that a key difference is that the satirical puts the joke on an entire social configuration, while noir tends to make the myopic antihero protagonist the de facto patsy for the web of scandal and corruption he encounters.  The tone of noir, in contrast to the satirical, is therefor generally tragic and not bitterly humorous, though of course one sensibility can appropriate from the other for ornamental and mood-augmenting purposes.  Regardless, noir usually remains dependably rooted in the tragic disposition, generally forgetting that the satirical lives only a couple doors down. All that is required to arouse its attention is a little zooming out. Then again, one could argue that the satirical permanently resides in proximity to every fictional genre.  Genre, as a concept, depends on a certain quantity of familiarity to signify in any cultural context, and the satirical impulse is clearly in the defamiliarization business. 

Anyway.  Theoretical matters aside, I can’t say I was prepared for the sheer pungency of the satire I would encounter when reading Jim Thompson’s 1964 novel Pop. 1280.  Jim Thompson, as I hope everyone knows, was the reigning sovereign of hard-boiled American crime fiction throughout the 1940’s through the 1960’s, with his generally agreed-upon peak period being his extraordinarily productive run (five novels in one year!) during the early 50s.  Pop. 1280, when considered as a narrative, is functionally a more sexually explicit (though not necessarily more violent) version of the earlier Thompson masterpiece The Killer Inside Me (1952), with the latter novel’s psychopathic sheriff protagonist Lou Ford being gifted a dark and cheerfully sadistic sense of humor to transform into the former novel’s Nick Corey.  As with Killer, Pop. 1280 presents an antihero who has mastered the fine art of obfuscating stupidity to get away with the twin sins of murder and superficial social respectability.  Nick Corey is the sheriff of the rural Potts County, the smallest (fictional) county in Texas, and he is a notoriously listless fellow who does the minimum of labor to keep his head above water in a community that can barely conceal its dark heart of cruelty, corruption, and debauchery.  The time is the early 1900’s in the former Confederacy, so of course it can hardly be otherwise.  The Russian Revolution is mentioned once.  It is apparently still in progress, but nobody really has anything to say about it.  Nick is married to a bitter and resentful woman named Myra whom he may have raped.  Myra seems to have no affection towards anyone but her mentally handicapped brother Lennie, who for his part has no passions beyond being the neighborhood peeping tom.  Nick is having an affair with a foul-mouthed woman named Rose Hauck, who is married to the physically and mentally abusive Tom.  The ease with which Nick can romantically (sexually) manipulate women is one of the few things in his life which brings him any pleasure. 

This set-up forms the core of the novel’s satirical orientation.  The murder plot that unfolds under the patronage of Nick Corey’s not-fully-explained psychopathic impulses is merely an occasion to shine a harsh and revealing light on the dysfunction of a provincial southern American community.  As the cliché goes, what’s done in the dark will be brought to the light, but what is brought to the light here are the governing cruelties of an entire social order, not just any one individual’s sins.  Each manipulative word and act of violence committed by Nick reveals a network of community and familial relationships steeped in myriad post-antebellum miseries and hypocrisies, and by the end of the story the reader has absorbed a satirical vision that’s almost Swiftian in its misanthropic energy.  The plot transpires in fairly familiar, overwrought noir fashion, but the cumulative effect is more Sinclair Lewis than Dashiell Hammett. 

An early episode in the novel signals to the reader that this is not going to be your usual scotch-on-rocks, fedora-wearing, gunplay-laden hardboiled crime story.  It is a moment almost worthy of Faulkner during his Snopes/The Hamlet period.  Nick, who resides in a makeshift living facility situated above the county courthouse, is growing increasingly disgusted with a public outhouse built in a clearing just outside his bedroom window.  All his efforts to remove it are repeatedly shot down by this or that public official, so he does the only prudent thing, on the advice of a fellow sheriff from a nearby county named Kevin Lacey- “So he told me what to do, and I did it. I sneaked out to the privy late that night, and I loosened a nail here and there, and I shifted the floor boards around a bit.  The next morning, I was up early, all set to spring into action when the proper time came.”  The proper time comes soon enough when the bank president, J.S. Dinwiddie, comes by that morning to answer nature’s clarion call. “He went rushing in that morning, the morning after I’d done my tampering- a big fat fella in a high white collar and a spanking new broadcloth suit.  The floor boards went out from under him, and down into the pit.  And he went down with them.  Smack down into thirty years’ accumulation of night soil.”

The farcical scene that ensues involves Nick rushing in with a bucket of water and some moral support to calm Dinwiddie’s understandably-aroused temper.  The image of a superficially respectable, white clad-professional pillar of the community drenched to the gills in excrement would seem to establish a satirical purpose for the narrative early on.  After the incident, the privy is removed and filled, and a superficial veneer of pastoral calm is placed over a literal pit of shit.  And this is due to the shrewd manipulations of the community’s strong arm of the law.  Dinwiddie himself attempts to take out his rage on every local official in sight in the wake of his humiliation, but ultimately proves ineffectual in bringing his threats to fruition.  He’s just another bourgeois suit whom the shit always dependably sticks to.  At times, Nick’s machinations carry an almost Mephistophelean character.  He manipulates his targets to reveal them.  But hell, if you want shit jokes, he’s got those too. 

The reader enters the main thicket of the plot when Nick pays sheriff Ken Lacey a visit in the neighboring county to ask for some advice about some local ne’er-do-well pimps who operate on the outskirts near the river of Potts County.  Ken Lacey is a perfect scoundrel, of course, and inflicts abuse on both Nick and his own deputy Buck.  But the core of his advice- advocacy of the principle of an eye-for-an-eye paid with interest- evidently leaves enough of an impression on Nick that he murders the two troublesome pimps upon his return to Potts.  Later, when Ken visits Nick in Potts, Nick manipulates him into spending the night at the brothel and reassuring the working girls that their employers would be much less troublesome from that point on.  He then further manipulates Ken into bragging around town (under the influence of alcohol, obviously), that he ‘took care’ of the pimps, and that they would no longer be a public nuisance. 

It is at this point, of course, that the reader completely groks that Nick is not the simpleton he pretends to be.  Ken groks it not long after when Nick takes him to the train station so that he may return to his neighboring jurisdiction.

                “Yeah,” he [Ken] grinned sourly, “that is funny.  Imagine a fella like you killing anyone.”

                “You can’t imagine me doing it, can you, Ken? You just can’t can you?”

                He said he sure couldn’t…

                “But it would be easy to imagine you doing that killing, wouldn’t it Ken?  Killing wouldn’t bother you a bit.”

                “What?” he said…

                “In fact, folks wouldn’t have to do any imaging, would they?  You’ve as good as admitted it to dozens of people.”

This shrewd management of events places Ken Lacey securely under Nick’s thumb, but it is only the start of the depravities Nick begins to inflict on his fellow citizens.  In a scheme which delivers just as much blackly satirical humor as it does political advantage to Nick, Nick drops the suggestion to the county attorney, Robert Lee Jefferson, that a rival for Nick’s sheriff seat, Sam Gaddis, is up to all manner of debauched transgressions.  He does this by apparently trying to discredit “the rumors” to Robert Lee, but of course, no such rumors exist… until Robert starts asking the townsfolk about them.  And then, of course, the collective depraved imagination of the good people of Potts (no doubt nurtured with a sufficiently unhealthy mound of repression) does all the legwork of politically useful rumor-mongering.  Nick himself is reflective on the matter- “I’d thrown the bait to Robert Lee Jefferson, and he’d bit on it.  He’d done just what I expected him to do- gone around, asking people what the stories about Sam were.  Which had started them to asking other people.  And before long, there were plenty of answers, the kind of stinking dirty dirt that people can always create for themselves when there ain’t none for real.  And it made me kind of sad, you know?  Really downright sad.”  Perhaps ‘reflective’ is over-generous.  A better term might be self-aware.  Something which doesn’t necessarily connote an inclination towards change.  Nick is not the sort of character who can introspect his way towards a fundamental shift in his character.  Only action- violence both physically overt and subtly psychological- might hold a key to an indecipherable desire for change that he insistently feels every hour of every day.  Nick’s schemes are all ostensibly carried out for his own benefit and the advancement (or at least retention) of his own social status, but owing to their obvious transgressive character they all hold the potential to absolutely ruin him.  And he tests his luck with every new murder, every new political scheme, and every new affair.

And speaking of affairs- pimp-slaying aside, most of Nick’s antics are concerned with the maintenance of his sexual relationships with three different women, at least two of whom are possessed of personalities that were forged eons ago in the more febrile corners of the male imagination: slightly different flavors of bitch-goddess.  Nick’s wife, Myra, as has already been mentioned, came into Nick’s orbit under extraordinarily volatile circumstances.  On the occasion of a date to a fair/carnival/festival/what-have-you, Myra and Nick retire to Myra’s rooming house and engage in some heavy petting which- quite possibly- Nick takes a little too far. “Well, sir, I hardly touched that woman.  Or, anyway, if I did touch her I didn’t do much more than that.  I was ready to and rarin’ to, and, well, maybe I did do a little something.  But with all them clothes she had on, it was god-danged little.”  The commotion draws the attention of the other roomers and assorted hangers-on, and it looks like Nick is about to be lynched, and Nick can’t help but consider the event in strangely sociopolitical terms. “I figure sometimes that maybe that’s why we don’t make as much progress as other parts of the nation.  People lose so much time from their jobs in lynching other people, and they spend so much money on rope and kerosene and getting likkered-up (sic) in advance and other essentials, that there ain’t an awful lot of money or man-hours left for practical purposes.”  The dry, laconic distance Nick keeps from his own immanent peril of course provides the requisite black comedy this narrative requires, but the satirical broadside against too-easy sociological explanations for southern backwardness and brutality gets to the heart of both Nick’s character and the role he plays in bringing his community’s vices to the light.  Nick, for all his violent, psychopathic failings, has an understanding of context and the interconnectedness of human beings as subjects within a historically-conditioned community.  He knows who he is has a great deal to do with when and where he is, and he is aware the same principle applies to his fellow citizens, but that a non-negligible number of them are not aware of it.  This enables him to successfully implement his manipulations, and reveal the structural contours of his county’s dysfunction.  It is heavily implied that his rape (?) of Myra and subsequent close call with death was a foundational lesson in his civic education: an instructional failure that would ensure later success. 

Nick’s life is saved by Myra’s intervention. Marriage and attendant tension ensues.

Speeding ahead with the summary: Nick is having affairs with two other women.  One of them, Rose Hauck, as has been mentioned, is married to the volatile and abusive Tom.  The other, Amy Mason, is one of the few respectable or otherwise decent people in town.  Nick murders Tom with a carefully placed couple of shotgun blasts (and later a hapless negro witness in a racially charged scene that provides even more caustic social commentary than the rape (?) of Myra), and not long afterward is confronted by Amy, who has deduced that Nick has murdered the two pimps and is attempting to frame Sheriff Lacy for the crime; she explains that she will expose him if he pushes that agenda any further.  Amy’s upstanding sense of right and wrong compels Nick to make the necessary moves to make her his one and only, and he whips up a scheme to jettison Myra, her brother, and Rose from his life all at once.  He manipulates Lennie into playing the peeping Tom while he is visiting Rose for a tryst.  Rose catches him and Nick encourages Rose to berate Lennie and accuse him of having an incestuous relationship with his sister.  Rose is under the impression that this is nothing more than a slanderous lie, and that its effect will just be to frighten Lennie off from any more nosing around in Rose’s affairs.

But… plot twist!  The rumor is true.  Nick had apparently always suspected it, but had no definitive evidence.  When Lennie informs Myra of the accusation, Myra returns with him and a camera and announces her plan to have Lennie rape Rose while she photographs it; leverage in case Rose ever thinks of going public with her accusations.  While Nick watches in hiding through the window from the outside, Rose panics and murders both Myra and Lennie with a handgun.  This murder prompts Rose to flee the county, and it looks like Nick may be on his way to fully consolidating his comfortable position in town. 

But then something strange happens; when Ken Lacey’s deputy Buck, who harbors some deep resentments towards his boss, pays Nick a visit asking for his cooperation in the investigation of Lacey for the murder of the two pimps, Nick feels compelled to confess his crime, much to the chagrin of Buck who would much rather send his hated sheriff up the river.  The novel ends ambiguously concerning Nick’s fate, and he is left in the same indecisive state that characterized his mindset at the start of the novel.

What shall we make of this?  The critic Sophie Watt, reading Thompson’s novel in conjunction with its French adaptation Coup de torchon and the novel Journey to the End of the Night (1932) by Louis-Ferdinand Cèline (commonly thought to be a chief inspiration for Thompson) does the appropriately early twenty-first century lit-crit thing and links the narrative and its related literary and cinematic texts to a legacy of western racial violence- “[Pop. 1280 and the other two works have] storyline[s] that progressively swallow up the main characters—Nick, Bardamu, and Lucien, respectively—in a spiral of violence.  Nick Corey, the sheriff of Pottsville in the American South, Lucien Cordier, the cop of Bourkassa-Ourbangui supposedly on the west coast of Francophone Africa, and Ferdinand Bardamu, a manager of a trading post for an important firm in Petit Congo, all have posts with important responsibilities.  However, the protagonists cannot function normally in their environment and are depicted as inefficient and become frustrated by their social positions, which are constantly ridiculed and questioned.   Nick and Lucien resort to killing the most toxic elements of their society, while Bardamu remains fascinated by his alter ego, a sort of doppelgänger, Robinson, who as an embodiment of misery develops a vocation to kill in order to escape his fate.   The dialogue between these fictions functions as a parallel narrative that reveals state organized systems propitious to crimes that comprise sociopathic elements.”  Here is adaptation theory as a kind of transnational critique.  It is a mode of criticism that reveals the interdependence of historical phenomena, in this case the legacies of slavery and colonialism.  This critical approach, of course, mirrors Nick’s sinister machinations in Pop. 1280.  The vices he exposes are socially embedded and communally interdependent, and the corrupted community of Potts County is in turn connected to a larger network of imperial and colonial practices founded on racial violence.  The dark irony of Nick Corey’s murderous rampage across Potts is that it functionally serves as a community clean-up campaign, or exactly the sort of work a law enforcement professional is supposed to conduct, from a certain point of view.  The trouble would seem to be that the long and strong arm of the law was molded by the same circumstances that created the people he murders or otherwise punishes; he’s a sociopath fighting sociopaths.  What redeeming and sympathetic attributes exist in this world exist at the margin, in the form of the lonely but decent Amy Mason and the hapless black man who discovers Nick’s murder of Tom.  The logic of Nick’s justice follows the same logic of violence as the systemic dysfunction he uncovers, and is therefor scarcely justice at all.  Depressing stuff, surely.  But also darkly funny.           

   Another angle that we may consider is, of course, the state of the American Dream as Thompson depicted it.  If we are to comprehend the concept as a sort of broad personal enterprising towards the goal of ‘freedom’ from the old hierarchies (however those are understood), then the manner in which it might go sour can best be captured along the lines of alienation, hypocrisy, and social displacement.  The reason being, of course, is that freedom can be a lonely and violent business. The critic Kenneth Payne has remarked that “Thompson’s alienated protagonists exhibit varying degrees of insight into the complex causes of their psychosis and the extent to which it may be an expression of a deeper cultural neurosis. Heredity and social circumstances usually play a large role, but the more insightful of these characters (like Lou Ford in The Killer Inside Me and Nick Corey in Pop. 1280) find ways to vent their disgust with what they see as the hypocrisy and the cynicism that infect the American world around them and in which they find themselves trapped.”  In Nick Corey’s case, he starts out with an American Dream (of sorts) already achieved.  He seems content and comfortable with his social status in Potts County, and is generally passive and permissive in the enforcement of the law.  His foundational sin, at first, appears to be sloth.  It soon becomes clear that this sloth (or complacent, materialist parody of the American Dream) is a thoroughly untenable position for Nick, but it may be the only thing keeping an obscuring fig leaf on the depredations of his community.  This is the American Dream as reassuring façade.  An old trope by now, definitely, but still amenable to skewering, particularly when the agent of the skewering is a violent psychopath.  Kenneth Payne again- “In spite of his pretense of feeblemindedness, he sees and understands a great deal more than any of the other characters in the novel. He has a nagging sense of the hollowness of his achievement; in a bleakly existential turn of phrase he admits that he has become “just a nothing doing nothing” (11). What Nick means is that his success has come to depend on his remaining a nonentity, by performing the public masquerade of an ineffectual and dim-witted smalltown policeman whose inaction in the face of blatant lawbreaking has won him the support of most of the Pottsville electorate. Like Lou Ford, Nick Corey has learned how to turn a blind eye to the dishonesty and corruption of his community, but at the same time cannot remain totally untroubled by its shams and villainies.”  Though Nick has achieved his American Dream, he is constitutionally unable to remain content with it.  Ironically enough, his resistance to the trap within which his comfortable, non-entity existence has ensnared him resembles nothing else but a dark parody of the pursuit of the American Dream- the resistance to the old order, the pursuit of material gain and a renewed status, the violent remolding of identity… it’s all there, manifested in murderous form.  It is not for nothing that Nick’s basic “success” with his schemes and murders places him in a psychological state nearly identical to his condition at the start of the novel.  The opening chapter concludes with these lines, passing across Nick’s consciousness while he sits in solitude- “So I thought and I thought, and then I thought some more.  And finally I came to a decision.  I decided I didn’t know what the heck to do.” The final chapter concludes with these lines, spoken as a confession to a recalcitrant Deputy Buck- “So here it is, Buck, here’s my decision.  I thought and I thought and then I thought some more, and finally I came to a decision.  I decided I don’t know more know what to do if I was just another lousy human being!” Nick has re-achieved his American Dream, and that is certainly part of Thompson’s satirical purpose.  It depicts the logic of the Dream as a cyclical pattern of personal regeneration through violence.  Joined with this process is an untenable social reconfiguration through the same violence.  The ending of Pop. 1280 depicts the latest turn of the bloody wheel as a communicative, social act.  In conjunction with Nick’s confession to Buck, we get Buck’s confession to Nick; the explanation as to why he is obsessively interested in pursuing murder charges against Sheriff Lacey despite his innocence- “I et a peck of dirt a day, every day I worked for Ken Lacey.  Et so much dirt that I could feel it seepin’ out of me, and I couldn’t hardly bear to hug my kids no more nor t’sleep with my wife for fear it would rub off on them, and they couldn’t never get clean like I figured I couldn’t never get clean.  Well, now, I got a chance to stop eatin’ it and put Ken Lacey under six feet of it.  And don’t you try to stop me, Nick.  You try to stop me, and t’me you’re just Ken Lacey; you’re his twin brother, spoonin’ the dirt into me every time I open my mouth, and I just can’t eat no more.  I just can’t, by God, I CAN’T EAT NO MORE DIRT! I C-CAN’T-“ Here the reader experiences the fund of resentment that prompts the regenerative cycle.  A man can’t rest on whatever laurels he may cull from his pursuit of the Dream, because the Dream always leaves a lingering, hangover-like condition that inevitably follows from the consequences of violence; it is conducive to men like Ken Lacey achieving power and influence, and it shapes the condition of communities like Potts County.  As long as such untenable conditions exist, there will always be another bloody turn of the wheel on the horizon; a need for a Nick Corey to pursue his Dream yet again.  The only mildly hopeful note that is sounded from this grim scenario is that the movement of Nick’s narrative shifts from the solitary to the (privately) social.  With any luck, it will soon be acceptable to say in public.        

And on that note… I haven’t read The Grifters yet, but it’s certainly on my radar.