Steven Frye

Melvillean Skepticism and Alternative Modernity in “The Lightning-Rod Man”

In an 1851 letter to Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville writes, “The reason the mass of men fear God, and at bottom dislike Him, is because they rather distrust His heart, and fancy Him all brain like a watch.” In his Palestine journal, further lamenting the seeming absence of enchantment in matters metaphysical, he takes on secular scholars and major figures of biblical higher criticism, who emphasized mythocritical and historical rather than spiritual treatments of the Bible. He found himself “sadly and suggestively affected” by the “indifference of Nature and Man” to all that was sacred and imbued with a sense of the transcendent, disenchanted by the “great curse of modem skepticism.” Regarding Barthold Georg Niebuhr and David Friedrich Strauss specifically, he writes: “When my eye rested on the arid heighth [s ic ] , spirit partook of the barrenness.-Heartily wish Niebuhr and Strauss to the dogs.-The deuce take their penetration and acumen. They have robbed us of the bloom.”’ There is little question that Melville is among the most quotable of American authors, especially in his journals and letters to Hawthorne, and these particular statements have been cited several times by critics concerned with Melville’s theological speculations. They illuminate the psychological trauma that plagued his contemplative life, particularly as it relates to “skepticism” broadly conceived. More often than not, in the long and distinguished history of critical inquiry into Melville’s religious sensibility, the author’s various comments are employed to highlight his questioning of the religious perspective imbibed in childhood. Lawrance Thompson, for example, places his skepticism firmly within the Protestant tradition, arguing that “Melville came to view God as the source from whom all evils flow, in short, the

‘Original Sinner,’ divinely depraved.”2 Similarly, William Braswell acknowledges the pervasive influence of Presbyterian Calvinism on Melville’s early life and contends that this experience was largely negative. He suggests that Melville expressed from the earliest stages of his writing career an unfavorable attitude toward Christianity, not only in theological figurations that challenge the notion of God as ultimate Good, but in his treatment of Christianity’s political manifestation in South Seas missionary projects.s In a reading of Piem, Braswell points to the moral conundrums Melville faced in attempting to reconcile the ways of God to humanity. He asserts that Melville “indicts the principles of Christian ethics by telling in great detail how a high-minded youth brings disaster on himself and several others by trying to live by the ethical teachings of Christ.“* Given the tone of parody that pervades the novel, one wonders whether Melville is less critical of Christian idealism itself and more concerned with the (in his view) inarticulate manner in which the sentimental “Christian” novels of his time reflect those values. Certainly, it was during this period that Melville experienced the critical setback of Moly-Dick, and he was keenly aware of what sold and what did not. He had taken more than one blow from Christian conservatives, who commented in vitriolic reviews on the blasphemy of the novel.

Jenny Franchot considers the complications of Melville’s outsider status relative to orthodox religion, and in doing so observes a malleability of perception figured in the trope of the ”traveling God,” in which “the dead body of Christianity is remobilized . . . as metaphor by Melville’s circular procedure of return and depart~re .”~ In Fran- chot’s view, Melville can be seen as the perpetual traveler who journeys continually between the

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realms of belief and unbelief and back again. In doing so, he confronts multiple and varied figura- tions of God: the fragmented and thus renewed God of monotheistic Christianity as well as the polytheistic gods of the South Sea islands. This mal- leability involves an unending search for religious meaning even in the ruins of what for many had become a “mere” mythology. But we may further shed light on Melville’s religous crisis if we focus on his aforementioned comment to Hawthorne and his journal entry carefully, if we parse his lan- guage thoroughly and contextualize it historically. Taken on their own terms and located within the fluid intellectual culture of the mid- and late nine- teenth century, his ruminations on the “heart” and the lost “bloom” of religious experience shed even further light on Melville’s tortured metaphysical speculations. The author’s emphasis on affective modes of epistemic revelation is conventionally taken as a pronouncement of “romanticism,” but his debt to British and American predecessors in the philosophical and the literary tradition r e p resents only part of the psychological picture. In his comment regarding the heart and mind of the divine, Melville does not question the existence of God per se. Instead, an unconventional form of rejection appears, and it becomes crucial to identify which God is defied and how skepticism is configured. In the context of an intellectual culture that is defining and redefining the concept of “skepticism,” Melville asks the following basic questions: If the historical reality of a Bible filled with mystery and magic is no longer intellectually tenable to the modern mind, how do we contend with our loss of enchantment? If in the deepest recesses of our being we experience something akin to a connection with the divine, how do we conceptualize an epistemological category that acknowledges this?6 Implicit in these questions is Melville the modern author.

In the early twentieth century, a number of notable writers implicitly challenge scholars who constitute the modem canon exclusively in terms of a radical experimentation in form and an embrace of purely secular perspectives. Among these are Graham Greene and Evelyn Waugh. As Greene wrestled with the particular form his Catholicism was taking in later life, he stated that

he had less “belief‘ but more “faith.”’ In a book- length interview titled The Other Man: Conversations with Graham Geme, the author comments on this distinction: “There is a difference between belief and faith. . . . Faith is above belief. . . . Belief is founded on reason. On the whole I keep my faith while enduring long periods of disbelief.”* In the explicitly Catholic novel Brideshead Revisited, Waugh’s character Julia Flyte Mottram refers to her spiritually bereft capitalist husband, now es- tranged, as “an organ kept alive in a laboratory . . . a sort of primitive savage, bu t . . . something absolutely modern and up-to-date that only this ghastly age could p r o d ~ c e . ” ~ Greene and Waugh, though highly respected, stand outside the con- ventional narrative of modernism represented by James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, and William Faulkner, insofar as they employ traditionally “realist” modes of narrative. But it is not form and technique alone that places them outside usual notions of modernism; it is the fact that as devout men of faith they lament, like Melville in his journal, the disenchantment of the world in the wake of the scientific enterprise, as well as the harnessing of science for material and mercenary purposes. In his distinction between “belief and “faith,” Greene echoes the epistemological crisis of the nineteenth century, implicitly distinguishing between knowl- edge objectively known, often associated with empiricism, which in a modern context one may assent to in belief, and personal and subjective knowledge, which requires a leap of faith. Mel- ville is often seen as anticipating, in his strident experimentation with narrative form, the aesthetic and formal innovations of modernism. However, it is also worth considering the manner in which he prefigures an alternative modern sensibility, one that seeks still to find a form of meaning un- mitigated by contingency and crass materialism, a meaning that derives itself from a sense of enchant- ment and mystery that is central to the religious sensibility. Critics have long noted this nostalgia in Melville-his antipathy to the dominance of scientific enterprise is largely a matter of critical consensus-but recognizing its “modernity” al- lows us to understand the particular way in which “belief‘ and “faith” are among his central preoc- cupations and helps us to comprehend a unique

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form of skepticism that is distinctly “Melvillean.” These issues figure in many of Melville’s works, from Moby-Dick and Pierre to Clare1 and Billy-Budd. However, one particularly compelling example, specifically in relation to scientific positivism, a p pears in “The Lightning-Rod Man.”

1

In a recent biography titled Melville: His World and Work, Andrew Delbanco places emphasis on “his world,” employing the author in an inquiry designed in part to illuminate the complex of social changes that typified the age. Delbanco begins by pointing out that when Melville was born in NewYork City in 1819, the town that was to become a great world metropolis was a dimly lit pre-modern community of only about one hundred thousand people. But by the time he died in 1891, the city’s population had grown to over three million. Modern technology energized the city with telephones and electricity, the Brooklyn Bridge and the Second Avenue Elevated Railway carried constant traffic, slavery had given way to Reconstruction, and a great wave of immigration had begun in full force. In Delbanco’s terms, “during Melville’s childhood, the rhythm of American life was closer to medieval than to modem, but by the time he grew old, he was living in a world that had become recognizably our own.” These changes were of course not only social and technological; they were fueled and enhanced by avibrant and, for some, disturbing transformation in our intellectual culture. Delbanco argues that “perhaps the most important intellectual event in Melville’s early years was the publication in 1836 of Emerson’s Nature,” which declared that a universal a priori moral principle organizes all objects in the natural world and creates of them a unity that is in essence an incarnation of the divine. But fifty-four years later, Melville borrowed the latest novel by William Dean Howells, A Hazard of New Fortunes, from the New York Society Library. This book was written in the wake of the discoveries of Charles Darwin, who had forced a disturbing reconsideration of the more extreme Emersonian conceptions, positing a world created over extended periods of geological time and

rife with brutality and indifference. His antipathy for transcendentalism notwithstanding, Melville admired the willingness of anyone who, in the tempest of life, willfully pushes free of the lee shore, and both of these extreme perspectives become essential ingredients in Melville’s engagement with his historical moment. In fact, as Delbanco notes, he was one of a number of writers whom Lionel Trilling describes as “repositories of the dialectics of their times” because they manifest in evocative terms “both the yes and no of their culture.””

In this context, the late nineteenth century was a time when the term “skepticism” acquired particular urgency of focus, specifically with respect to the “Great Debate” and the “new sci- ence.” The verbal tussle between T. H. Huxley and Bishop Wilberforce, which shook the walls of Oxford University in 1860, led to an epistemic shift defined in specific terms later by Huxley in Agnosticism and Christianity. This epistemology em- braced a “scientific skepticism” predicated on the notion that “it is wrong for a man to say that he is certain of the objective truth of any proposition unless he can produce evidence which logically justifies that certainty.”” The very substance of Huxley’s argument prohibited him from engaging in questions regarding the nature and existence of God, questions that preoccupied Melville, but the historical outcome of this perspective suggests either an absent God or a reaffirmation of the a b stracted deity of “natural law” that took renewed shape in the seventeenth and eighteenth centu- ries.’z Melville anticipates this “Great Debate” in his early work and engages it throughout his life. With typical reserve, he does not take sides, distancing himself from Wilberforce’s orthodoxy, but he positions himself in opposition to Huxley’s particular brand of skepticism, positing instead a deeper and more radical form, one that anticipates the major concerns of alternative modems such as Greene and Waugh.

This “Melvillean” skepticism is distinctive, defined by the manner in which it stands outside of any systematizing epistemic method, whether scientific, religious, quasi-religious, or mystical. An aspect of Trilling’s dialectic is described in specific terms in James Turner’s Without God, Without Creed: The Origins of Unbelief in America. Turner explores

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the slow process of secularization that made both agnosticism and atheism viable intellectual options in the late nineteenth century. And he traces how the epistemological revolution of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries led to early attempts by religious intellectuals to reconcile secular science with traditionally doctrinal accounts of creation. But it was these very attempts to “modernize” belief that led to schisms in religious conception, crises that manifested themselves in the minds of thoughtful people on both a personal and a philosophical level:

As a part of their attempt to modernize belief, church leaders and religious writers were splitting the old conception of “belief.” They were, in effect, dividing the conviction of God’s reality from the trust and love that He inspired. The former became increasingly an intellectual question; the latter remained a more com- plex matter involving other areas of the psyche. This conceptual shift took place subtly, generally eluding observation, so that language did not always keep pace with thinking. Nevertheless, “belief” and “faith,” previ- ously interchangeable, were in practice increasingly employed in different contexts-the one pointing to intellectual conviction of definable propositions, the other to personal

Turner describes a phenomenon in intellectual culture identifiable with the nineteenth century, and in doing so makes clear that the personal dilemma confronted by Graham Greene found its origins a century earlier. Historically, “belief“ and “faith” were one and the same, and both were fundamentally epistemological in origin and concern. Both responded effectively to the existential crisis and uncertainty that had plagued the human race since the birth of consciousness. Initially, the Enlightenment presented itself as a companion of traditional faith, and as Turner argues, “eighteenthcentury culture could scarcely support unbelief as a really viable option.” But the arguably reasonable and liberal attempts to reconcile the sacred and the secular, which took place in America in the nineteenth century, essentially fractured the epistemological stability of traditional religion. “Belief“ became an intellectual category that required, perhaps not certainty, but empirical evidence. “Faith” remained personal, a matter of subjective experience, and as such, at

least in certain intellectual circles, had to remain silent.

Together with this radical separation of belief and faith in the epistemologcal sphere, questions emerged regarding the basic relationship between God and the creation. The birth of “Natural Re- ligion” in the eighteenth century led to varied conceptions of the nature, function, role, and per- sonality of the creator. The slow but unremitting shift in attention from scripture to nature occurred not only among secular intellectuals but among religious leaders as well. As Turner suggests, “If science and rationalism had raised questions about God and unsettled belief, then what more logical response than to shore up religion by remodeling it in the image of science and rati~nality!”’~ The scriptural foundations of religious faith that had formerly stabilized notions of God as personal and anthropomorphic were challenged by deist and rationalist notions of God as clockmaker-as “designer” and “builder” of the material world. The deity of perfection and goodness who is likewise capable of human feelings gave way among many to a cold and mathematically configured God of natural law, and this is of course the “watch” God to whom Melville refers in his letter to Hawthorne.

Even religious leaders felt compelled to acknowledge this aspect of God’s identity, since they “increasingly conceived assurance of God as a matter of the intellect and the grounds of belief as rationally demonstrable.” Thus, even before the Darwinian revolution, notions of the divine had been radically reenvisioned and destabilized, not only by secular intellectuals who were minimally concerned with theological and metaphysical ques- tions, but also by professional clergy and devoutly religious intellectuals. Melville laments this histori- cal phenomenon when he takes aim at the work of two of its major practitioners, Niebuhr and Strauss. Melville’s particular brand of skepticism is highly critical of the shift in epistemic grounding that permitted scientific modes of thought to dominate the intellectual scene, even among the clergy. This assent to the scientific sensibility is as problematic for Melville as any unmitigated assent to religious orthodoxy or transcendental mysticism. Turner points to the late nineteenth century as the period when unbelief was born, when Huxley coined

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the term “agnosticism,” which in Turner’s words emerged as a “self sustaining phenomenon” that allowed disbelief in God to “grow beyond a rare eccentricity” and “stake out a sizeable permanent niche in American culture.” In essence, Bishop Wil- berforce’s willingness to engage T. H. Huxley on his own terms becomes the emblematic act of the time, since in doing so he tacitly acknowledged the primacy of scientific explanatory methods, and in an attempt to modernize belief he deemphasized the notion of subjective knowledge, the primacy of the human “heart,” in apprehending a divinity that is more than an indifferent designer of gears and p~1lies.l~

Melville finds himself living, thinking, and writing in the midst of this cataclysmic epistemic shift, and in this context finds it dimcult to “be- lieve” in a conventional sense, a perspective cap tured by Hawthorne in the epigrammatic claim, “he can neither believe nor be comfortable in his unbelief.”I6 But given the distinction between ”belief“ and “faith” that Turner associates with the intellectual culture of the nineteenth cen- tury, Melville’s inability to be comfortable in his unbelief results from the fact that he strives with some desperation to retain his “faith,” not neces- sarily in purely orthodox conceptions of divinity, but in an assent to some life-sustaining realm of the numinous that finds its incarnation in the human intellect unrestricted by pure rationality. Melville’s discomfort results from his discontent with the terms upon which unbelief is grounded. A rejection of the divine constituted exclusively on scientific grounds is objectionable to Melville for a host of reasons, not the least of which is that science is rarely conducted by men concerned with the deepest and most compelling questions, most of which are intensely philosophical, psychologi- cal, even religious in nature. But more specifically, the “scientific agnosticism” of men such as Huxley involves a mode of comprehension and conscious- ness anathema to human essence, to the circuitous, mysterious, and often ternfylng pathways of the human heart. This rejection of the dominant positivism of his time leads Melville to consider, at some tortured remove, essentially religious ways of knowing, and his simultaneous rejection of both methods in their purest form results in

Melville’s particular “skepticism.“ This skepticism is grounded, however tentatively, in ”faith,” in an assent to the efficacy of truth and a commitment to the heroic pursuit of it, but it is equally informed by a paradoxical assumption that beyond the lee shore lie vast reaches of ocean which swallow more men than they sustain, and which harbor “the ungraspable phantom of life,” the knowledge that human reason can never penetrate and hold as its own. Thus in the terms clarified by Turner, for Melville there can be no basis for “belieF in the structures of orthodox religion. But equally, there can be no grounds for unqualified assent to the truths revealed by science, since they are inconse- quential to the deeper, more essential questions that preoccupy Melville. In the face of the scientific revolution, “faith” in a reconfigured modem and personal sense must remain the central path of any life-sustaining intellectual journey.

This recognition anticipates a major but rarely considered strand of intellectual inquiry in the twentieth century. Though Graham Greene pro- fessed a continued faith in the Catholic Church, his relationship to its various orthodoxies was tense and rife with struggle. Evelyn Waugh also remained devout, but he was acutely aware of modem read- ings of the Christian story as myth, as he expresses through the perspective of the agnostic Charles Ryder in Brideshead Revisited. The commonalities between Melville and these later authors can be clarified through a detailed reading of ”The Lightning-Rod Man.”

2 “The Lightning-Rod Man” was extremely popular with the reading public during Melville’s time, and it was the only story that remained in print until his death. It first appeared in Putnam 5 Monthly (July 1854) and shortly thereafter in The Pzazza Tales (1856). It was later collected in William E. Burton’s Cyclopaedia ofryit and Humor (1857) and in the years following regularly featured in various volumes of fiction. Even after the author’s death in 1891, the story was reprinted in Capital Storiac by American Authws.” It is a telling fact that “The Lightning- Rod Man” is rarely anthologized now-perhaps because it is limited in thematic scope when

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compared to such masterpieces as “Bartleby, the Scrivener” and “Benito Cereno,” but perhaps also because it spoke directly to intellectual and spiritual concerns emerging at the time. Throughout the body of his critical work, specifically in studies such as Poe’s Fiction: Romantic Irony in the Gothic Tales and The Art of Authorial Presence: Hawthorne’s Provincial Tales, G. R. Thompson has addressed the use of the comic and ironic modes in the short fiction of the American dark romantics. Rendered with subtlety, this romantic irony encourages readers to delve beneath the surface realities of texts, under which lie multilayered thematic textures relating to a myriad of epistemological, metaphysical, psychological, and even social themes. In The Art of Authorial Presence, Thompson states:

The romantic ironist . . . acknowledges and embraces contradiction, opposition, and paradox in a deliberate aesthetic embodiment of indeterminacy in tension with determinacy. Thus “negative” romanticism does not mean anti-romanticism, but the negative side of romanti- cism My intent in using such terms as negative romanticism and negative romance is not so much to resolve anything as to accommodate multiplicity in critical discourse that recognizes the polyvalence of romanticism.’*

This indeterminacy and polyvalence opposes sin- gular perspectives and challenges any totalizing ideology or epistemological practice. l9 At the heart of this aesthetic practice is a radical skepticism one may associate with Melville, at least as it relates to religious concerns. Although the comic elements in “The Lightning-Rod Man” have a certain a p peal, the story, taking place over a few moments in the narrator’s living room, lacks much of the tension we associate with a conventional plot, and it is certainly devoid of the exoticism one finds in Melville’s most popular work. However, the themes of indeterminacy of the sort Thompson explores, as well as the caustic satirical thrust in the story, in some fundamental way resonated with nineteenth- century readers, addressing concerns that haunted them, concerns which Turner clarifies in his treat- ment of the religious and epistemic changes that in part defined the times.

Early critical treatments of the short story tended to interpret the lightning-rod salesman in allegorical terms-as a symbol of evangelical

Christianity. As Allan Moore Emery notes, critics such as Ben D. Kimpel, Egbert S. Oliver, Eric W. Stockton, Hershel Parker, and R. Bruce Bickley Jr. argue that the salesman in the story attempts to motivate by fear. He speaks with a tone of ur- gency and employs a rhetorical strategy typical of the religious charlatan, stating unequivocally, “Mine is the only true rod.”20 At the same time, he accuses the narrator of profanity. The situation portrayed in the story, together with features of the language, support Kimpel and the others to a degree, but reading the “The Lightning-Rod Man” exclusively in these terms narrows the interpretive possibilities. Further, to contend that evangelical Christianity is the primary target of Melville’s satire may in fact be a distortion in emphasis. As Emery argues: “The lightning-rod man typically fills his conversation with technical assertions regarding the phenomenon of lightning and the practical precautions most helpful in avoiding its dangers. In an allegorical assault on hard-core Protestant- ism, such remarks-various and continual-would seem curiously out of place.”21 The primary object of criticism in the story, I would suggest, is practi- cal science and positivism, which asserts that by unlocking the secrets of nature, specifically one of its more evocative and dramatic expressions- lightning-we may achieve certitude and safety. This becomes even more clear when we consider the fact that two probable sources of the story are Benjamin Franklin’s Letters and Papers on Electricity (1751-53) and Lucius Lyon’s Treatise on Lightning Conductors (1853). In addition, the story takes aim at a form of consumerism that would package and sell those certainties door-to-door. In broad terms, the story challenges all forms of chicanery, whether religious, scientific, or mercantile, but the major satirical thrust is directed at scientific endeavor, specifically at the applied science that has become complicit with capitalism. In addition, Melville calls into question any paradigm-governed intellectual sensibility that denies, in Thompson’s terms, indeterminacy and radical skepticism-in this case the particular indeterminacy and skepti- cism that resolve themselves in mystery, that can only find their partial explanation in the language of enchantment and mythology. In the context of nineteenth-century intellectual culture, this lan-

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guage and conceptual framework acknowledge the efficacy of faith and its separation from belief.

“The Lightning-Rod Man” begins in a realm of enchantment, with playfully rendered descrip tions that are full of classical allusions. The nar- rator’s lack of a fully configured belief appears in the ironic and even comic tone he employs with reference to mythological events and figures. H e treats them, uses them for their explanatory power, but does not “believe” them in any strict or literal sense-as highlighted by his use of Greco-Roman rather than Christian mythology. Still, as the story unfolds, the narrator finds in these images, figures, and patterns of thought a repository of hidden truth, however elusive. This appears as the story begins in the narrator’s allusion to “Acroceraunian hills,” which refers to the high mountain range between Epirus and Macedonia. It appears also in the “grand irregular thunder,” as well as in the lightning, with its “charge of spear-points,” an image that associates thunder with Jove himself (“Lightning Rod,” 118). Mythological allusions continue as the lightning-rod salesman arrives and the narrator greets him:

“Sir,” said I, bowing politely, “have I the honor of a visit from that illustrious god, Jupiter Tonans? So stood he in the Greek statue of old, grasping the lightening-bolt. If you be he, or his viceroy, I have to thank you for this noble storm you have brewed among our mountains. Listen: that was a glorious peal. Ah, to a lover of the majestic, it is a good thing to have the Thunderer himself in one’s cottage. (1 19)

The wry humor in the narrator’s address, here and throughout the story, betrays more than a little distance from the myths he employs, as if he anticipates the salesman’s pitch and intends to toy with him. Indeed, as a skeptic of the negative romantic strand Thompson identifies, the narrator stands outside any totalizing system that would ex- plain, among other mysteries, the phenomenon of lightning.** But as the story continues, it becomes clear that science is the real confidence game, and in his motives and manner of expression, the salesman reminds us of the various manifestations of the confidence man in Melville’s novel of that name (perhaps not coincidentally published in 1857, just after “The Lightning-Rod Man”). At the

very least the narrator is a “lover of the majestic,” as his various rhapsodic descriptions of the storm suggest, and he becomes increasingly frustrated with the salesman’s fear (whether feigned or not) and with his inability to appreciate the beauty and even the mystery of the storm. Allegorically, the lightning-rod salesman represents both modem science and modern mercantile capitalism. He identifies himselfwith the present age as he com- mands the narrator not to call him by a “pagan name,” and he is distinctly modern in sensibility, since he associates “profanity” with an appreciation of the descriptive power of mythological language. The salesman’s empiricism could not be more clear, and the relationship of scientific endeavor to money and commerce is tangible in his words:

Iron is easily fused. Then they draw out the rod so slender, that it has not body enough to draw out the full electric current. The metal melts; the building is destroyed. My copper rods never act so. Those Cana- dians are fools. Some of them knob the rod at the top, which risks a deadly explosion, instead of imperceptibly carrying down the current to the earth, as this sort of rod does. Mine is the only true rod. Look at it. Only one dollar a foot. (121)

The language of the lightning-rod man near the end of the passage is at least arguably the rhetoric of the religious huckster. However, he speaks firmly in scientific terms, explaining in detail the physical process by which the rod attracts lightning, the differences between the properties of various rods, the consequences of making the wrong choice of material. At the same time, he is the consummate modern capitalist, the man who has harnessed scientific knowledge for commercial use and in doing so has reduced the power and mystery of lightning as a natural phenomenon. His final assertion is expressed in the form of a mercantile exchange. His scientific knowledge made practical sells for “only one dollar a foot.” But the narrator stands determinedly against the assertions of the scientific con man, and Melville quite successfully conflates the religious charlatan with the modern man of applied science. The narrator engages the salesman in a playful and at times caustic rhetorical game, signaling that he is well attuned to the other’s methods of persuasion:

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“‘For one who would arm others with fearlessness, you seem unbeseemingly timorous yourself”‘ (121). In recognizing the dubious motives of the salesman, the narrator positions himself relative to the distinction between “belief‘ and “faith.” The lightning-rod salesmen cloaks himself in the illusion of rationality, presuming to teach the narrator fundamental principles about lightning and in doing so making a profit. The salesman reads the narrator’s lack of fear as ignorance and instructs him on what he must believe, since belief must be founded on empirical proof and scientific modes of explanation. But the Melvillean narrator remains skeptical, even of knowledge scientifically constituted, since he is fully aware of the mercenary motives that drive the creation of knowledge-and he perceives, as well, the limitations of fact in helping us understand the hidden meaning of lightning. Lightning is more than electrical current; it is an emanation from a divine mystery:

”You mere man who come here to put you and your pipestem between clay and sky, do you think that because you can strike a bit of green light from the Leyden jar, that you can thoroughly evert [sic] the supernal bolt. Your rod rusts, or breaks, and where are you? Who has empowered you, you Tetzel, to peddle round your indulgences from divine ordinations?” (“Lightning- Rod,” 124)

Here the religious confidence game of sold indulgences that motivated the Protestant Ref- ormation is associated with the materialist con of the scientific revolution. The narrator’s use of mythological language continues, with a telling and dramatic shift into Judeo-Christian mythology, as he describes the salesman as a Satan figure: “The scowl grew blacker on his face; the indigocircles enlarged round his eyes as the storm-rings round the midnight moon. He sprang upon me; his tri- forked thing at my heart” (124). The language of mythology remains the best means of clarifymg the identity of the confidence man, yet it is the dis- placed figurative language of literature rather than the coherent expression of orthodox religion.

The narrator’s assent to divinity is noticeably displaced from any system. At first this doesn’t seem so, as he speaks in conventional religious

terms-“I stand at ease in the hands of my God”- but as he goes on, his representation of divinity takes on a peculiarly secular tone: “See, the scroll of the storm is rolled back; the house is unharmed; and in the blue heavens I read in the rainbow, that the Deity will not, of purpose, make war on man’s earth” (124). The biblical terminology remains, with words such as “scroll,” “storm,” and “heavens,” but the language is oddly displaced and malleable in the terms identified by Franchot. It offers fluid images that merge with other conceptions-such as the mysticism implied in the “reading” of the rainbow, and in the notion of God as “Deity,” a term that suggests a more abstracted notion of divinity divorced from any single religious tradition. The mere fact that the narrator employs both classi- cal and Judeo-Christian materials speaks to the fact that he recognizes the descriptive capacity of myth and literature in capturing the mystery of the divine. It is likely that he has little “belief‘ in particular systems, but he possesses a firmly grounded faith in the reality and even the benevo- lence of the divine, however removed from human understanding.

In spite of this vagueness in expression, the narrator’s last words might easily be read as an expression of a firm Christian perspective, but this would of course contradict what we know about the author’s religious struggles. In fact, Delbanco argues that the body of Melville’s work charts a movement from tortured religious skepticism to emotional exhaustion, which he associates with the author’s final and somewhat quiet assent to the absence of God. Delbanco reads Billy Budd as a creative reenactment of the story of Abraham and Isaac, in which Captain Vere is “Abraham per- forming the sacrifice of Isaac, torn to the depths of his soul by the conflict between love and duty.” However, the story is recast in modern terms, and the saving power of the divine, in Delbanco’s view, no longer presides: “In Melville’s reprise of the father-and-son story from Genesis, there is no intervention by a merciful God. There is no God at all.” The difficulty with this argument is that the presence of God would be impossible to orchestrate in a story written in a decidedly realist mode and could only be done through metaphor,

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symbol, and image. Arguably, this presence appears in the innocence and right action of Billy himself, and in the powerful image of crucifixion through which his death is made visible. In a reading of Clarel, Delbanco acknowledges the ambiguities and the latent desire for transcendence present in the poem, but interprets it in terms similar to his reading of Billy Budd, suggesting that the poem is set in a “world of heat and sand,” with its “deeper locale” in the “spiritual desert of the mind.” Fur- ther, he argues that “the labor of composing the poem” was the author’s “stay against emptiness,” since “Melville could never escape the melancholy suspicion that his feelings of divine immanence were illusory.”23 Certainly, Melville’s doubt was the inevitable outcome of his radical skepticism, but the later works involve a form of seeking and affirmation that emerges from his commitment to affective modes of perception and knowing. In Melville% Protest Theism: The Hidah and Silent God in wClarel, ” Stan Goldman deals directly with Melville’s religiosity at the time of the poem’s com- position, arguing in general terms that “rebellion can be a theological search, and, quite often, it is only the near-unbeliever who thinks deeply about faith.”24 Though Goldman doesn’t employ the precise distinction between “belief“ and “faith” articulated by Turner and Greene, it is implicit in the search of the near unbeliever for solace in faith. Goldman reads Clarel as a narrative representing a genuine spiritual journey unhindered and unen- hanced by orthodox paradigms of religious under- standing, where rebellion and protest are central to any genuine apprehension of the ultimate. In this context Goldman argues: “The only cure for the anxieties of questions and counterquestions is the heart-not the mind. Only through the heart can the paradox of a God hidden, but not absent, be resolved.”25 This assent to the affective, to a realm of comprehension that works its magic be- yond the purely rational-in effect to a faith newly defined-is a central feature of many of Melville’s works, notably “The Lightning-Rod Man.” These works look ahead in very specific ways to the intel- lectual preoccupations of modem authors working in a culture infused with the scientific sensibility. As Greene describes his occasional and even fre- quent loss of belief: “At such moments I shrug my

shoulders and tell myself I’m wrong-as though some brilliant mathematician had come and told me my solution of an equation was wrong. My faith remains in the background, but it remains.”26 Thus, far beyond his use of experimental narrative form, Melville, in this other sense, is an author of a distinctly modem sensibility, and he anticipates some of the central intellectual concerns of the early and mid-twentieth century-concerns that remain fundamental to any thoughtful consider- ation of epistemology and the life of the mind.

California State University, Bakersfield

Notes

Herman Melville, Correspondence, ed. Lynn Horth, vol. 14 of The Mtings o f H m n Melville (Evanston and Chicaco: Northwestern Univ. Press and the Newberry Library, 1993), 192; Melville,JoumLr, ed. Hamson Hay- ford with Lynn Horth, vo1.15 of The Writings of Hennan Melville (Evanston and Chicago: Northwestern Univ. Press and the Newberry Library, 1989), 97.

Lawrance R Thompson, Melville’s Quurrel with God (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1952), 6.

William Braswell, Melville’s Religious Thought: An Essay in Zntetpwtation (Durham: Duke Univ. Press, 1943), 74-76.

Braswell, Melville’s Religious Thought, 76.

Jenny Franchot, “Melville’s Traveling God,” in The cambridge Companion tu Hermun Melville, ed. Robert S . kvine (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1998), 157. See also Judy Logan’s exploration of the same idea in “The Catnip and the Amaranth: Melville’s Struggle with the ‘Ever Encroaching Appetite for God,’” Chktianity and Litmature 51 (2002): 387-406. Logan suggests that in various works, including M a d , MolyDick, Pin, The G m j h M a n , and Clarel, as well as in personal letters, Melville creates characters that “cycle” between the realms of belief, doubt, and unbelief. She centers her argument on an image of the catnip and the amaranth, which are associated with “the ever-encroaching appetite for God” (34M5).

124 Poe Studies/L)ark ~ ~ u ~ t z c i s ~

On Melville’s preoccupation with the episte- mological debates of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, see Nancy Roundy, -‘ That is all I Know of Him . . .’: Epistemology and Art in Melville’s ‘Bartleby,’” Es- says in Arts and Sciences 9 (1980) : 33-43. Roundy argues that Melville was “well-aware” of the debate centering on “the relationship between the mind and the world (33). Melville was steeped in literature related to this topic, especially those works dealing with the imagination, including Mark Akenside’s popular philosophical poem The Pleasures of the Imagination (1744); Joseph Addison’s Spectator Papers (1 71 2); Edmund Burke’s Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1 757); Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria (1817); and Thomas Carlyle’s Sartor Resartw (1833-34)-as well as the ideas of Emerson and Kant. Roundy notes that, though he may not have read Kant directly, Melville was familiar enough with the subject to spend an entire night discussing it with two German professors. In his 22 October 1849 journal, Melville writes: “Last night about 9 Vz P.M. Adler & Taylor came into my room, & it was proposed to have whisky punches, which we did have, accordingly. Adler drank about three table spoons full-Taylor 4 or five tumblers &c. We had an extraordinary time & did not break up till after two in the morning. We talked metaphysics continually, & Hegel, Schegel [sic], Kant, &c were discussed under the influence of the whiskey. I shall not forget Adler’s look when he quoted La Place the French astronomer-‘It is not necessary, gentlemen, to account for these worlds by the hypothesis’ &c. After Adler retired Taylor and I went out to the bowsprit-splendid spectacle” (Jay Leyda, The Melville Log A Documentary Life of Hermun Melville, 1819-1891 [New York Harcourt, Brace, 19511,1:322). For a treatment of Melville’s relationship to the Scottish Enlightenment, see Andrew Hook, “Hogg, Melville, and the Scottish Enlightenment,” Scottish Literary Journal 4, no. 2 (1977): 25-39.

’Graham Greene and Marie-Francoise Allain, The Other Man: Conversations with Graham Greene (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1983), 162.

Greene and Allain, Conversations, 162-63.

Evelyn Waugh, Brideshead k i t e d : The Sacred and Profane Memories of Captain Charles Ryder (New York: Little, Brown, 1944), 200.

lo Andrew Delbanco, Melville: His World and Work (NewYork: Alfred A. Knopf, 2005), 3,16, quoting Lionel Trilling.

T. H. Huxley, Agnosticism and Christianity, in The

Norton Anthology ofEnglish Literature: The Victorian Age, 7th ed. (NewYork W. W. Norton, 2000), 2B:1567.

l2 It can certainly be asserted that this notion of the divine was first conceptualized in ancient Greece in the concept of God as “Fate” or “Necessity,” which is in essence divine principle and the fixed structures of natural law.

l 3 James Turner, Without God, Without Cwed: The Origins of Unbeliefin Ama’ca (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1985), 51.

l4 Turner, Without God, 46.

l5 See Turner, Without God, 46, 49, 171.

16From Hawthorne’s 1856journal titled TheAmeri- can Notebooks; excerpted in Leyda, Melville Log, 2:529.

l7 This brief publication history was originally compiled by Sean R. Silver in “The Temporality of Al- legory: Melville’s ‘The Lightning-Rod Man,”’ Arizona Quarterly 62 (Spring 2006): 1-33.

l8 G. R. Thompson, The Art ofAuthoria1 Presence: Hawthorne> Provincial Tales (Durham: Duke Univ. Press, 1993), 13.

l9 In an article dealingwith Melville’s short fiction, I argue for patterns of dialogic interchange in ThePiazza Tabsimilar to those observed by G. R. Thompson in The Provincial Tales. See Steven Frye, “Bakhtin, Dialogics, and the Aesthetics of Ambiguity in ThePiarza Taks,” Leviathan 1 (October 1999): 39-51.

*O Herman Melville, “The Lightning-Rod Man,” in The Piazza Tales, and Other Prose Pieces, 1839-1860, ed. Harrison Hayford, Alma A. McDougall, G. Thomas Tanselle, and others, vol. 9 of The Writings of Hennan Melville (Evanston and Chicago: Northwestern Univ. Press, 1987), 9:121; hereafter cited parenthetically. See also Allan Moore Emery, “Melville on Science: ‘The Lightning-Rod Man,”’ New England Quarterb 56 (1983): 555-68. For critics noted by Emery, see Ben D. Kimpel, “Two Notes on Herman Melville: 11. Melville’s ‘The Lightning-Rod Man,’” Amm.can Literature 16 (1944): 30-32; Egbert S. Oliver, “Explanatory Notes,” in The Piazza Taks, by Herman Melville (New York: Hendricks House, 1948), 238-41; Eric W. Stockton, “A Commen- tary on Melville’s ‘The Lightning-Rod Man,”’ Pupers of the Michigan A c a d a y of Science, Arts, and Letters 40 (1955) : 321-28; Hershel Parker, “Melville’s Salesman Story,” Studies in Short Fiction 1 (1964): 154-58; and R. Bruce Bickley Jr., The Method of Melville’s Short Fiction (Durham: Duke Univ. Press, 1975).

Melvillean Skepticism 125

21 Emery, "Melville on Science," 555.

22 The major genre form ofthe negative romantic is the gothic, since by its formal nature it often forces themes of indeterminacy into the foreground. For a treatment of the gothic genre as a challenge to Enlight- enment rationalism, see Ellen J. Goldner, "Other(ed) Ghosts: Gothicism and the Bonds of Reason in Melville, Chesnutt, and Momson," MELUS 24 (Spring 1999): 59-83.

23 Delbanco, Melville, 314,280,282.

24 See Stan Goldman, Melville's Aotest lk isrn: The Hiddn and S i h t God in "Ckawl" (DeKalb Northern 11- linois Univ. Press, 1993), 12. In a volume dedicated to the career of G. R. Thompson, it is only appropriate to note that Goldman credits Thompson in his acknowl- edgments: "The Romanticist and Poe scholar G. R. Thompson read the manuscript carefully and kept me organized. His editorial skills made my dense argument accessible."

25 Goldman, Melville's Aotest Th&m 165.

26 Greene and Allain, Conversations, 162-63.