David Haven Blake

I have frequently written about American political culture and am the author of an award-winning book on presidential history.  At the moment, however, The Prosthetic Arts of Moby-Dick feels like the most political of my books in its focus on democracy, wound collecting, and the role that Islamic cultures play in American narratives of revenge. In the following commentary piece (first published on the Oxford University Press Blog and then republished by the Writers for Democratic Action Substack), I discuss the ways in which Melville anticipated our current political crisis.  The piece begins:

Like the white whale itself, Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick (1851) seems ubiquitous across time. For nearly a century, readers have turned to Captain Ahab’s search for the whale that took his leg to understand American crises. During the Cold War, commentators debated Ahab’s Stalin-like powers. After the September 11 terrorist attacks, the question of vengeance took center stage. Was Ahab Mohammad Attah crashing an American Airlines jet into the World Trade Center’s North Tower, or was he George W. Bush searching for weapons of mass destruction in Saddam Hussein’s Iraq?

Donald Trump’s return to the presidency offers a different question about Melville, domination, and US political life: How do Americans gain power by claiming that they have been wronged? Trump continues to shatter political norms, but complaining about mistreatment is part of the nation’s DNA. As erratic and self-indulgent as it may be, Trump’s sense of injury stretches back to the series of grievances that the Declaration of Independence itemized about King George III. Continued at OUP Blog

174 years ago, Herman Melville wrote the following remarkable sentence in his study in Pittsfield, MA:

Melville’s writing desk at Arrowhead, his farm outside Pittsfield, Massachusetts

“That for six thousand years — and no one knows how many millions of ages before- the great whales should have been spouting all over the sea, and sprinkling and mystifying the gardens of the deep, as with so many sprinkling or mystifying pots; and that for some centuries back, thousands of hunters should have been close by the fountain of the whale, watching these sprinklings and spoutings –that all this should be, and yet, that down to this blessed minute (fifteen and a quarter minutes past one o’clock P.M. of this sixteenth day of December, A.D. 1850), it should still remain a problem , whether these spoutings are, after all, really water, or nothing but vapor – this is surely a noteworthy thing.”

It would become the opening of Chapter 84, “The Fountain,” in Moby-Dick.

I am happy to report that The Prosthetic Arts of Moby-Dick is now published and will hopefully soon be coming to a library near you.  No one is expecting individuals to purchase this hardcover volume, though if you would like Oxford University Press to publish a paperback, please visit the book’s website.  (The press is going to use web traffic to help determine if a paperback is warranted, so I would appreciate your visiting the site when you can.)

As I explain in the Acknowledgements, this book is especially personal to me as a teacher: “For nearly forty years my favorite author to teach has been Herman Melville, for his work means so much to so many. I have taught Melville’s works to boarding school students, to military cadets, to executives in an MBA program, to neighbors in community book clubs, and to high school teachers under the auspices of the Woodrow Wilson Foundation. I have taught many generations of students at The College of New Jersey—some of whom have married each other, some of whom have gotten whale tattoos, and some of whom have gone on to teach Moby-Dick themselves. All of them have taught me something important about Ishmael’s “mighty book.” I gratefully dedicate this study to them. As always, friends, We try all things; we achieve what we can.”

The cover of a Norton Critical Edition often tells us where scholarship is heading. Midway through the writing of The Prosthetic Arts of Moby-Dick, I was pleased to see that Norton had put Ahab’s whalebone leg on its cover.  The illustration, done by the Russian artist Oleg Dobrovolski, highlights the role that disability and prosthetics play in this novel.  (Ahab is not the only impaired character in the book, and Moby-Dick is just one of Melville’s writings that meditate on injury, prosthetics, and disability.)  How have you imagined Ahab’s ivory leg?

“Ye have not a whole body, sir; do ye but use poor me for your one lost leg; only tread upon me, sir; I ask no more, so I remain a part of ye.”

— Pip, Chapter 129, “The Cabin”

2019 marks the 200^th anniversary of Walt Whitman’s birth. Around the world, people have celebrated Leaves of Grass, gathering in Philadelphia, New York, Atlanta, Bolton, England, and countless other places to recognize Whitman’s poetry and democratic vision. “It avails not, time nor place—distance avails not,” Whitman wrote in “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry.” “I am with you, you men and women of a generation, or ever so many generations hence.” Like Jennifer Crandall’s breathtaking video series “Whitman, Alabama,” these celebrations have demonstrated how present the poet is with us today.

To celebrate Whitman’s 200^th birthday, Brian Clements of the North American Review has launched the Every Atom project in which 200 contributors write a short essay on a passage from “Song of Myself.” Founded in 1815, NAR is the perfect magazine to publish this work. The oldest literary magazine in the United States, its past contributors range from Ralph Waldo Emerson and Frederick Douglass to William Carlos Williams and Flannery O’Conner. “The North American,” Whitman once told a friend, “is hospitable to new, strange views; invites, accepts, and that is a gift these days.”  For my selection, I chose a single line from section 25 of “Song of Myself”: “My voice goes after what my eyes cannot reach” in which, I argue, the poet becomes a voyager, “his voice audaciously pursuing others like a lover, hunter, or follower of new gods.”  You can read the short essay here.

In 2015, the National Endowment for the Humanities awarded me an Enduring Questions grant to develop a new course at The College of New Jersey on the meaning of fame from Antiquity to the Enlightenment.  In my previous research and teaching, I had always seen fame as a form of the exalted individualism we find in capitalism and democracy.  The grant helped my students and me explore what fame meant before these powerful historical forces emerged in the 18th century and how it shaped such works as The Iliad, The Aeneid, the Gospel of Mark, and the Confessions of St. Augustine.  In October, the NEH magazine, Humanities, published my reflections on teaching this course in an essay the editors titled “Addicted to Fame: From the Greeks to Lady Gaga.”

Teaching this course was one of the most rewarding experiences of my career, especially because my TCNJ students offered such fresh, insightful perspectives on both the material and their experience growing up in our attention-mad society.  I think you will agree that their contributions to this essay were invaluable. Here’s the introduction:

“Fame is a bee,” Emily Dickinson wrote in one of her last poems. “It has a song— / It has a sting—.” “Ah, too,” she added, “it has a wing.”

The poem captures Dickinson resigning herself to how ephemeral fame can be, how effortlessly it moves from one person to the next, pleasing, wounding, and deserting them as it travels across the earth.

Dickinson’s comparison came to mind as I prepared a course at The College of New Jersey on the history of fame. On campuses across the country, one can find fascinating classes dedicated to the study of stars like Beyoncé, Madonna, and Bruce Springsteen. My course took a different approach. It focused not on individual personalities, but on the long line of thinkers who have grappled with the meaning of fame.

An Allegory of Fame, (circa 1630), by Bernardo Strozzi.

Today’s college students are part of a fame culture that is far more absorbing than the one in which their parents grew up. Waves of publicity crash over them daily, with Twitter, Instagram, and BuzzFeed now added to the mix of dorm-room posters and fan magazines. But young people no longer see themselves as just spectators. Listen to the most savvy among them, and they’ll offer detailed strategies for “creating a personal brand” and “curating a digital identity.” As the phrase goes, they aim to optimize their presence in an attention-based economy.

My aim was to build a course that could defamiliarize fame by exploring its roots in the ancient world. I wanted students to see that fame was not always associated with glamor and excess. I wanted them to appreciate how previous cultures had integrated fame into treasured stories about virtue, character, mortality, and public life. But like Dickinson’s bee, our discussions took flight and frequently landed us in fields far removed from antiquity. In the end, my students discovered the remoteness of the past; what they taught me is its unmistakable presence today.  Continued at Humanities:

This weekend we celebrate the 160^th anniversary of Herman Melville’s troubling novel The Confidence-Man; His Masquerade. Published on what was then called April Fool Day, the novel features a series of confidence tricks performed on a Mississippi River boat, named the Fidèle, on April 1 sometime in the 1850s. The Confidence-Man raises many questions (for example, exactly how many con men are on board?), but each of the tricks depends on an expression of confidence in the world. When passengers question the con man or refuse to buy into his schemes, he urges them to open their hearts and speak with sincerity. “Ah, now,” he says in the guise of the buoyant Frank Goodman, “irony is so unjust: never could abide irony: something Satanic about irony. God defend me from Irony, and Satire, his bosom friend.” To state the obvious, Melville is winking at his reader. From its first paragraphs to its apocalyptic end, the novel provides a textbook example of irony: it says one thing and means another

Melville’s novel captures the ways in which Americans could reinvent themselves as they pushed further west. In the turbulence of the antebellum period, the Confidence Man urges his victims to look charitably on their fellow passengers and faithfully place their trust in him. When they resist, he accuses them of being faithless, of leading cynical lives, of disliking humanity and being misanthropes. What makes the Confidence Man so successful is that he swindles his victims not only of their money, but of the skepticism and critical thinking they need to successfully navigate their lives.

The Confidence-Man is a difficult, problematic novel, one that unsettles its readers and gives them no footing in the text or the world. Nineteenth-century critics struggled to make sense of the book; “ineffably meaningless and trashy,” one reviewer called it, a “reckless perversion of high abilities,” wrote another.

160 years later, Melville’s probing and destabilizing novel may have found its time. As reports of fake news and paid internet trolls swirl around our digital frontier, as our leaders urge us not to question their actions and to place our trust in their hyperbolic vision of the world, The Confidence-Man is more urgent than ever, though the cause for that urgency would no doubt lead our great mariner to even deeper despair.

Thanks very much to the Association of American Publishers for giving its 2017 PROSE Award in Media & Cultural Studies to Liking Ike: Eisenhower, Advertising, and the Rise of Celebrity Politics.

According to the AAP website, the PROSE Awards, “annually recognize the very best in professional and scholarly publishing by bringing attention to distinguished books, journals, and electronic content in over 40 categories. Judged by peer publishers, librarians, and medical professionals since 1976, the PROSE Awards are extraordinary for their breadth and depth.”

It is great to have Liking Ike included in such a distinguished group of books.

Today marks the 60th anniversary of Ike Day, the star-studded celebration of President Eisenhower’s 66th birthday that was held in the midst of his re-election campaign.   Over ten years ago, I heard about this forgotten moment in American political history and started the research that led to Liking Ike.

Actress Irene Dunne celebrating
Ike Day with the president’s favorite cake

Time magazine has helped me commemorate the anniversary by publishing my reflection on Ike Day and the 2016 presidential campaign.  Here’s a sample:

Produced by the McCann-Erickson advertising agency and funded by some of the nation’s wealthiest families (the Rockefellers, DuPonts and Olins among them), the Ike Day program barely acknowledged its role in the presidential race. There was no talk of policy, no reference to political parties and no mention of Eisenhower’s Democratic opponent, Adlai Stevenson. And yet, to many in the press, the telecast struck a note of political genius. “As a demonstration of how to win friends and influence voters,” the Philadelphia Inquirer commented, the program “was worth dozens of speeches.” The Washington Post concluded, “without a single plea for partisan votes, it was the most politically effective program of the week.”  Continued at Time magazine.

And finally, for those of you who love cooking as much as history, you might be interested in Mamie Eisenhower’s special recipe for Ike’s Favorite Cake.  All over the country, volunteers baked cakes according to this recipe and brought them to Children’s hospitals, Veterans facilities, and nursing homes in honor of Ike.  I have not baked one of these myself, but as Carl Anthony illustrates, Mamie was well known for her elaborate cakes.