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The Nation, May 10 2017
What Herman Melville Can Teach Us About the Trump Era
By Ariel DorfmanY
Herman Melville in 1860. (Wikimedia Commons)
Santiago de Chile may seem a strange place from which to try to
understand Donald Trump and how to resist his most aberrant edicts and
policies, and yet it is from the distance and serenity of this Southern
Cone city, where my wife and I live part of the year, that I have found
myself meditating on these issues, abetted by the insight and doubts of
none other than Herman Melville.
When the Pinochet dictatorship forced me and my family into exile after
the 1973 coup, the vast library we had laboriously built over the years
(with funds we could scarcely spare) stayed behind. Part of it was lost
or stolen, another part damaged by a flood, but a considerable part was
salvaged when we went back to Chile after democracy was restored in
1990. What strikes me about these books that have withstood water and
theft and tyranny is how they enchantingly return me to the person I
once was, the person I dreamt I would be, the young man who wanted to
devour the universe by gorging on volume after volume of fiction,
philosophy, science, history, poetry, plays.
Simultaneously, of course, those texts, mostly classic and canonical,
force me to measure how much desolate and wise time has passed since my
first experience with them, how much I myself have changed, and with me
the wide world I traveled during our decades of banishment, a change
that becomes manifest as soon as I pick up any of those primal books and
reread it from the inevitable perspective of today.
Since we just elected as president an archetypal liar and impostor, ‘The
Confidence-Man’ is a good place to start.
It is a happy coincidence that the works I have chosen to revisit on
this occasion are by Melville, as I can think of no other American
author who can so inform the perilous moment we are currently living.
Roaming my eyes on shelf after shelf, I soon lit upon his enigmatic
novel The Confidence-Man: His Masquerade, and sandwiched between it and
Moby-Dick, a collection of his three novellas, Benito Cereno; Bartleby,
the Scrivener; and Billy Budd, Sailor.
Having just participated, as an American citizen, in the recent election
that elevated to the presidency an archetypal liar and devious impostor
who has hoodwinked and mesmerized his way into power, The Confidence-Man
seemed like an appropriate place to start. Though it was published 160
years ago, on April Fool’s Day, 1857, Melville could have been
presciently forecasting today’s America when he imagined his country as
a Mississippi steamer (ironically called the Fidèle) filled with “a
flock of fools, under this captain of fools, in this ship of fools!”
Like Trump, the Confidence Man exercises on his dupes “the power of
holding another creature by the button of the eye.”
The passengers of that boat are systematically bilked by a devilish
protagonist who constantly shifts his identity, changing names and
shapes and schemes, while each successive ambiguous incarnation tries
out one scam after another, swindles and snake-oil-trickery that were
recognizable in his day—and, alas, in ours. Fraudulent real estate deals
and bankruptcies, spurious lies disguised as moralistic truths,
grandiose charitable undertakings that never materialize, financial
hustles and deceptions, bombastic appeals to the honesty of the suckers
while showing no honor whatsoever—it all sounds like a primer for Trump
and his buffoonish 21st-century antics and “truthful hyperbole.”
Of course, Melville’s time was not the age of Twitter and Instagram and
short attention spans, so his ever-fluctuating rascal engages in endless
metaphysical discussions about mankind, quoting Plato, Tacitus, and St.
Augustine, along with many a book that Trump has probably never even
heard of. And rather than a bully and a braggart, this 19th-century
pretender is garrulous and genial. But just like Trump, he displays an
arsenal of false premises and promises to dazzle and befuddle his
victims with absurd and inconsistent projects that seem workable until,
that is, they are more closely examined—and then, when cornered by
demands that he provide proof of his ventures, the scamp somehow manages
to distract his audience and squirm away. And also like Trump, he
exercises on his dupes “the power of persuasive fascination, the power
of holding another creature by the button of the eye,” which allows him
to mercilessly best his many antagonists, exploiting their ignorance,
naïveté, and, above all, greed.
Indeed, Melville’s misanthropic allegory often seems less a denunciation
of the glib and slippery trickster than a bitter indictment of those
gullible enough to let themselves be cheated. The author saw the United
States, diseased with false innocence and a ravenous desire for getting
rich, heading toward Apocalypse—specifically, the Civil War that was a
scant four years away. Fearful that, behind the masquerade of virtue and
godliness performed by the role-playing passengers, there lurk shadows
of darkness and malignancy, he was intent on revealing how the excessive
“confidence” in America’s integrity, virtuousness, and “ardently bright
view of life” can lead to tragedy.
And the novel ends in a quietly terrifying way. As the light of the last
lamp expires and a sick old man, one final quarry of the Confidence Man,
is “kindly” led toward extinction, the narrator leaves us with this
disturbing forecast: “Something further may follow of this Masquerade.”
Those words pester me, because the “something further” that we are
living today is a grievous circumstance that Melville could not have
anticipated: What if somebody like the slick Confidence Man were to take
power, become the captain of that ship of fools—in other words, what if
someone, through his ability to delude vast contingents, were to assume
control of the republic and, like mad Ahab, pursue the object of his
hatred into the depths (in Trump’s sea there are many white whales and
quite a few minor fish) and doom us all to drown along with him?
If Melville was not concerned with the possibility that his Confidence
Man might become a demented, uncivil president, he did bequeath us,
nevertheless, three short masterpieces where the protagonists rebel,
each in their own special way, against an inhumane and oppressive
system. By reading once again the novellas Bartleby, Billy Budd, and
Benito Cereno, I hoped, therefore, to discover what guidance Melville
might provide those of us who ponder how to fight the authoritarian
proclivities that Trump and his gang epitomize as they seek total and
uncontested power to radically remake America.
I began, obviously, with Bartleby, the Scrivener.
“I would prefer not to”: Those are the emblematic words with which the
protagonist, a copyist for a Wall Street lawyer (who is also the
bewildered narrator of the tale), invariably responds when asked to
perform the most minimal tasks but also when offered a chance to better
or protect himself, to the point of losing his job, his housing, and,
eventually, his life, as he ends up starving his body to death in
prison. When I first read this novella in my youth, I saw it, not
incorrectly, as an allegory about Melville himself. At the time it was
published—in 1856, just before the experimental and uncompromising The
Confidence-Man came out—the author (whose Moby-Dick had sold poorly and
been, in general, misunderstood when it appeared in 1851) was struggling
with his own refusal to accommodate his style and vision to the
commercial literature of his age, a refusal that corresponded with my
own 1960s ideas about not selling out to the “establishment.” Though I
was able to grasp, as many readers have since Bartleby first appeared,
that this radical rejection of the status quo went far beyond a defense
of artistic freedom, delving into mankind’s existential loneliness in a
Godless universe, it is only now, beleaguered with the multiple dangers
and dilemmas that Trump’s authoritarianism poses, that I can fully
appraise the potential political dimensions of Bartleby’s embrace of
negativity as a weapon of resistance.
Not because his ascetic withdrawal, passivity, and “pallid hopelessness”
are what the majority of Americans who voted against Trump need in these
times of bellicose regression. It is, rather, the specific way in which
the protagonist posits his rebellion that may serve as a model for those
of us who feel threatened by the aggressiveness of this president, who,
like Ahab, is “possessed by all the fallen angels.” What disarms, indeed
leaves Bartleby’s employer “unmanned,” is that the scrivener’s responses
are unwaveringly mild, “with no uneasiness, anger, impatience or
impertinence.” Bartleby’s individual intransigence was insufficient to
change the disheartening world in Melville’s time, but it is a great
place from where to start an active resistance in ours.
Imagine “I would prefer not to” as a rallying cry. Sanctuary cities and
churches: “I would prefer not to help hunt down undocumented men, women
and children.” Indigenous tribes and veterans and activists: “I would
prefer not to step aside when the tanks and the pipelines roll in.”
Civil servants at federal agencies: “I would prefer not to enact orders
to destroy the environment, eviscerate the public school system,
deregulate the banks, devastate the arts, attack the press; I would
prefer not to cooperate with unjust, misguided, stupid, contradictory
executive orders; I would prefer not to remain silent when I witness
illegal acts that violate the Constitution,” and on and on we could go,
on and on we must go, if we are to be free. If every opponent of Trump
were to adopt this stubborn and placid refusal to go along—each deed of
collective defiance always begins with somebody individually saying
“No!”—our belligerent president would find it difficult to impose his
will, though we should expect a great deal of executive pressure against
and persecution of those who stand in his way. Indeed, there are far too
many signs already that dissidence, criticism, recalcitrance,
whistleblowing, and protests will be met with the full force of the state.
Whether that repression manages to control those who challenge Trump on
multiple levels will not only depend on the obduracy and cunning of the
president’s adversaries, but also on how the judiciary intervenes in
this battle. How justice is served and, indeed, interpreted, will
determine whether the orders of a fraudulent occupier of the executive
branch can be contained.
It was thus natural to plunge next into the most distressing of
Melville’s works, the last one he ever wrote (it remained unfinished at
his death in 1891), the haunting and haunted Billy Budd. The title
character is a sailor, conscripted into the British navy, who never
thinks of using the words “I would prefer not to,” but, on the contrary,
is agreeable and compliant. An angelic being, almost divinely handsome,
able to lighten each day’s burden with his good cheer, popular among the
crew and the officers, Baby Budd, as he is called, is an innocent lamb
of a man loved by everybody on board the Bellipotent. Well, not
everybody—precisely this wholesome harmlessness and beauty create in
Claggart, the master-at-arms of the ship, a hatred, rage, and envy, an
“unreciprocated malice,” that Melville attributes to sheer depravity and
unfathomable evil. Given that Claggart is in charge of policing,
discipline, and surveillance, he has at his disposal an arsenal of means
to trap Billy, deceitfully accusing him of conspiring in a mutiny, at a
time when the British Navy had been wracked with widespread revolts by
sailors. When confronted with this indictment, Billy—afflicted by a
“convulsed tongue-tie” incapacity to speak out when he is under extreme
emotional stress—responds by striking Claggart. The blow kills the
satanic master-at-arms—and Billy must face trial in front of a hastily
convened drumhead court.
The administration (or mismanagement) of justice that follows is the
crux (I use the word deliberately, as we will witness a crucifixion) of
the story. Melville goes out of his way to praise Captain Vere, the
commander of the ship: He is well-read, fair, brave, often dreamy,
eminently honorable, and has a sincere fatherly affection for Billy
Budd, intending to promote him. And he does not doubt that Claggart (for
whom he feels “a repellent distaste”) is lying, nor that his victim
knows nothing of any conspiracy or harbors a single mutinous thought,
and yet, Vere’s reaction to the homicide is peremptory:
“He vehemently exclaimed, ‘Struck dead by an angel of God! Yet the angel
must hang!’ ”
Having thus passed judgment on Billy Budd, Vere will manipulate his
court of junior officers (all dependent on him and under his authority)
to declare the sailor guilty, without allowing for palliating
circumstances or for the matter to be referred, as naval practice and
law demand, to the admiral for adjudication. In order to get the verdict
he desires—fearing that compassion and flexibility might encourage
disorder and sedition—he must ignore his private conscience and yield to
the imperial code of war and argue against a “warm heart,” which he
calls “the feminine in man” and thus must be distrusted and “ruled out.”
This failure of the father figure to protect the weak is a tragedy not
only for Captain Vere (who will die in battle not long after this
incident, with Billy Budd’s name on his lips as he agonizes) and for the
blameless handsome sailor (who dies blessing the captain who has wronged
him), but for humanity itself in its journey toward redemption.
If Melville is concerned with the miscarriage of justice (and one can
only hope that the US courts will differ from Captain Vere by shielding
those who are unable to defend themselves from malignant attacks and
overreach by the government), his novella also probes another
disquieting matter that obsessed him all through his life: the question
and legitimacy of violence.
Violence comes in many guises and varieties in Billy Budd. There is, of
course, the violence of the state, which Captain Vere incarnates and
exercises with “full force of arms.” And then there is the violence of
Claggart, the official enforcer of order who abuses his power and
becomes an instrument of perfidy and immorality. But most interesting is
Billy Budd himself. Why does the angel deliver the lethal blow that will
annihilate him? He speaks with his fists when his tongue and throat are
struck dumb by an assault upon the core of his being so wicked that he
could not foretell it. Indeed, it is his extreme good nature, his
unwillingness to recognize evil—despite having been warned that
Claggart, with “his small weasel eyes,” is out to get him—that leaves
him unprepared. One could almost venture that our ill-fated hero has too
much trust and “confidence” in his fellows.
Melville had already explored these issues of innocence and violence in
Moby-Dick—where the crew and officers are unable to stop the crazed
skipper of the Pequod from driving them all to ruination (all, that is,
save the narrator, who wants to be called Ishmael)—but it can be argued
that nowhere did he delve deeper into those predicaments than in Benito
Cereno, serialized in a magazine in 1855 and revised when it was
published as part of Piazza Tales in 1856 (again, just before The
Confidence-Man appeared).
This traumatic story is centered on an astounding event at sea that
actually happened, as I vaguely recalled as I opened the book, off the
coast of southern Chile, a few hundred miles from where I was now
re-reading it. A group of slaves—the year was 1805—took over a Spanish
vessel, killed most of its white crew and passengers, and demanded that
the captain, Benito Cereno, return them to Africa. Melville moves the
date to 1799 and rebaptizes the ship the San Dominick in order to more
closely parallel the successful—and extremely ferocious—slave
insurrection against the French on the isle of Saint-Domingue that would
lead to the establishment of Haiti, the first black republic in the
world. He is basically saying to his unheeding American public: This
bloodletting awaits us if we do not end slavery.
What is extraordinary about Benito Cereno is that Melville has chosen to
oppose slavery not by staging, as in Uncle Tom’s Cabin or so many
abolitionist tracts and memoirs of the day, the cruelty and viciousness
of those who hold other humans in bondage but rather by dramatizing how,
when those slaves seek liberation through the only fierce means
available to them, they will imitate their masters, use the same fear
and torment that was imposed upon them to make sure that their former
overlords do not dare to rebel. But that is not all: Melville presents
this dire reversal of roles through the eyes of Amasa Delano, a
well-meaning and decent American captain who, having generously sailed
to the rescue, is duped by the masquerade that the slaves have forced
the surviving whites on board to perform: that the ship has succumbed to
a series of misfortunes (hurricanes, illnesses, adverse winds), that
have left most of the whites on board dead and most of the blacks alive
and wandering the deck helplessly, the eternal social order intact.
Filled with racial prejudices, Amasa is unable to conceive that not only
have the slaves broken out of what he considers their natural state of
submission and submissiveness but that they have the subtlety and
intelligence to create such an intricate plot. His blindness to the
possibility of evil (the evil that is slavery and how that evil can also
infect the slaves themselves) derives from his blindness to his own
complicity in that evil, his failure to distinguish shadows from light,
appearance from reality.
Amasa Delano joins a long list of Melville’s male protagonists (there is
hardly a spirit-lifting woman or a child in his bleak tales) who are
contaminated by innocence, who do not understand that, as a character in
The Confidence-Man says, “nobody knows who anybody is” in a world that
is a “painted décor,” where the worst of us hide their vilest appetites
and sins under a veneer of nobility and the best of us are oblivious to
the depths and spirals of that villainy. Melville’s heroes can be fooled
because they are fooling themselves. It is the case of Billy Budd, who
does not wish to even consider what Claggart is up to. It is the Wall
Street lawyer, oblivious to how his style of life and aspirations are
ultimately responsible for Bartleby’s refusal to cooperate. It is Benito
Cereno, who never realized that the cargo of slaves he was carrying
could spell his doom. It is Captain Vere, who suppresses the feminine in
his heart in favor of the law of war without realizing that a few days
later he will die in that war, that he has killed himself by hanging
Billy. It is the case of the predestined company of the Pequod. There is
no dearth of tenderness or affection, no lack of humor and intimations
of hope in Melville’s parables—and he glories in the wonders of
storytelling—but his basic message to America (and the world) is to wake up.
Fools, those who thought it could not happen here and did not fully
measure the rage and inhumanity blighting America.
Reading these cautionary chronicles in the light of today’s disastrous
Trump ascendancy, what struck me most was how so many Americans were
unmindful, as Melville’s characters are, as to what the future would
bring, the collective incapacity (and I include many of Trump’s
supporters) to imagine, like Billy Budd, that such malice and trickery
exist. And I admit that I shared the presumption that there were enough
decent and good-willed white people in the United States to stop the
lowest moral citizen in the land from capturing the highest political
office, the most powerful on the planet. A sin of optimism: America is
too good, too exceptional, too wonderful, a country to commit that sort
of fatal mistake.
Risky as it may be to extrapolate and extract prophetic words about the
future from an author long dead, I might warrant that Melville would
thunder: You fools. Fools, those who believed and continue to believe in
Trump despite all evidence that he has conned you. And fools, those who
thought it could not happen here and did not fully measure the rage and
inhumanity blighting America since its inception. And more fools, all of
you, to think it might get better than worse as the deranged days rush
by, deluding yourselves that the institutions that have provided checks
and balances through so many calamities will stand this test.
I started rereading Melville in Chile animated by the expectation that
my distance from the United States would help me to see how this author
could illuminate the America of today and tomorrow, but to my surprise,
as I advanced into his fictional universes, I had to admit that the
frailties he was exposing and the quandaries he was scrutinizing could
be applied to the country where my reading was taking place, a country
whose long struggle for equality and justice, culminating in the
peaceful 1970 revolution of Salvador Allende, had been sadistically
suppressed.
Chileans back then nursed the illusion that our democracy was stable and
enduring, only to be inconsolably awakened by the military coup of 1973,
becoming aware, when it was too late, of the fragility of our
institutions. How quickly so many of our people succumbed to demagoguery
and brutality, how easily they normalized the everyday malice of
dictatorship as they fell under the spell of consumerism.
But I also recognized in Melville’s masterpieces the very forms of
resistance that many of us contemplated during those seventeen years of
tyranny. Confronted with regression, shattered by grief, abandoned by
the judges who were too craven and cowardly to defy the despotism of
General Pinochet and his oligarchical civilian acolytes, we had to
choose between the armed rebellion of the slaves on the San Dominick or
the “I would prefer not to” of Bartleby. Though there were some—a small
group—among the military’s challengers who embraced violence against
such a nefarious regime as righteous and the only path to victory, the
enormous majority of the democratic opposition were wary of this
insurrectionary strategy. It was a tactic destined to fail, we
thought—and we were wary of the consequences of that violence, even in
the unlikely case that it could be successful rather than
counterproductive. History had taught us the same lesson that Melville
had presaged in Benito Cereno: Far too often have the revolutionaries of
today become the oppressors of tomorrow, repeating the mistakes and
coercion of yesterday. And so, with the infinite patience of an Ishmael
and the insubordination of a Bartleby and the angelic resolution of a
Billy Budd, we vanquished the Claggarts of Chile.
Would the American people be able to do something similar?
Melville might say, I presume, that it cannot be done without a drastic
ethical transformation of the country, the recognition that Trump is the
mere excrescence of America’s dark soul. Our author would point out that
what now plagues us are the sins of the past coming home to roost:
America’s tolerance of bigotry and racism, America’s optimistic
blindness to its own faults, America’s love affair with bogus spectacle
and masquerades, America’s culpable innocence amid imperial expansion.
The Confidence Man—and Men—will continue to triumph until the
citizens—or enough of them—take responsibility for having helped to
create a land where Trump’s victory was not only feasible but, at some
point, almost inevitable, a nation where so many Americans felt so
alienated and abandoned that they willingly embarked on the “ship of fools.”
Of course, Melville wrote at a time when the submerged voices of
humanity were hardly able to make themselves heard. So many of his
protagonists are either rendered speechless in moments of crisis, like
Billy Budd, or remain mute, like the slaves on the San Dominick, while
their story is told and twisted by someone else, someone more powerful.
Even Bartleby cannot rationalize or articulate why he rebels. And,
except for the narrator, none of the sailors and officers of the
multiethnic Pequod survive to tell the tale of the White Whale. Melville
saw his blasphemous literature as providing an alternate version to the
official “truth” of dominant history.
Today things are different. The voices of those who will and must engage
in civil disobedience are anything but silent as they try to avoid the
impending catastrophe.
And so, when I wonder if Melville’s fellow countrymen and women will be
able to withstand the onslaught of the Confidence Man’s presidency, when
I ask myself if the best of the American people will find the strength
and cunning to force those in power to listen, when I try to imagine
what sort of land the future holds, I leave the answer to that great
ally of ours from the past, our eternal Melville. Here is how I
prefer—yes, prefer—to envision that tomorrow where “something further
may follow of this Masquerade,” describing it with some magical words
culled from Moby-Dick: “It is not down in any map: true places never are.”
Or better still: “I try all things, I achieve what I can.”
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