Edward Alexander Sugden - Emergent Worlds: Alternative States in Nineteenth-Century American Culture

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Emergent Worlds: Alternative States in Nineteenth-Century American Culture

Edward Sugden

Edward Sugden

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Sugden, Edward (Edward Alexander), 1986 author.

Title: Emergent worlds : alternative states in nineteenth-century American culture / Edward Sugden.

Description: New York : New York University Press, 2018. | Series: America and the long 19th century | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN | ISBN 9781479899692 (cl : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781479889266 (pb : alk. paper)

Subjects: LCSH : American literature19th centuryHistory and criticism. | Social change in literature. | Literature and historyUnited States. | Melville, Herman, 18191891Political and social views. | AmericaHistory19th century. | Social changeHistory19th century. | Political cultureHistory19th century.

Classification: LCC PS217.S58 S84 2018 | DDC 810.9/003dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017060984

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Call me Ishmael.

However, it is the second sentence, or at least the start of it, that has always drawn me in, in spite of it not receiving anywhere near like the same critical attention: Some years agonever mind how long preciselyhaving little or no money in my purse, and nothing particular to interest me on shore, I thought I would sail about a little and see the watery part of the world (3). Some years agonever mind how long precisely... The phrase can pass one by as the paragraph establishes its ebbing, symphonic rhythm, with its references to classical history and subconscious instinct, but it nonetheless stands out to me. It has When placed against this larger context, there appears to be an awful lot at stake in Melvilles misdirection as he points us away from asking when it was that the voyage took place. On this basis, I suspected that these two clauses, although offhand, would grant us a gateway into a conceptual universe every bit as deep as the equally blandly equivocal opening sentence.

And so it proved: this sentence ultimately was the seed out of which this work grew, raising the issues of historical framing, geographical placement, elusive politics, time consciousness, and the roots of a series of alternative, internationalist genres that crystallized into a cogent organization in the 1850s with which it is concerned. It now appears to me that we can find in this sentence a concentrated, compacted gesture toward the definitional crisis that has engulfed the study of the US Americas, and, as a subset of this field, nineteenth-century American literature, insofar as such a thing exists, in the last fifteen years. It forces us to ask what the whens, wheres, whats, and whos of these fields of study are and the social relationship of the imagination to these same questions. But I am getting ahead of myself: let us return to the text and see what else it might tell us. Melville actually gives us the answer to how many years ago precisely it was that Ishmael went to sea reasonably soon after this sentence, before, indeed, the close of the first chapter. Yet the answer he gives is less important than the terms in which he frames it:

And, doubtless, my going on this whaling voyage, formed part of the grand programme of Providence that was drawn up a long time ago. It came in as a sort of brief interlude and solo between more extensive performances. I take it that this part of the bill must have run something like this:

• Grand Contested Election for the Presidency of the United States.
• WHALING VOYAGE BY ONE ISHMAEL .
• BLOODY BATTLE IN AFFGHANISTAN . (7)

This framework would place Ishmaels adventure at some point in the late 1830s or early 1840sor, not without some significance, as we will see in the conclusion, sometime between 1999 and 2003. However, I am more interested inand indeed think that the novel is more interested inthe tantalizing phrase embedded there, the brief interlude that for him characterizes the relationship between Ishmaels voyage and history and, by extension,