Read Online The Empire of Necessity by Greg Grandin - Free Book Online

ways about his country’s shortcomings, but he was too much of a metaphysician, and too much of an agnostic concerning his metaphysics, to turn his criticism into a political program. Melville would later pay close attention to the Civil War. There is no evidence, though, that in the 1850s he was especially concerned about the plight of actual existing slaves in the South. After the disappointment of Moby-Dick, he became preoccupied with philosophy, with larger questions of ethics, withdrawn into himself to the point that he broke down. His disquiets were at once psychic and cosmic but not, apparently, primarily political. 2
    Yet it is exactly Melville’s existential digressions that speak directly to the problem of slavery in Western society, that go straight to the heart of what the massive and systemic subordination of millions and millions of human beings over the course of hundreds and hundreds of years meant to the societies that prospered from slavery and to the slaves who suffered creating that prosperity. Melville wrestled with whether life had meaning, and if it had, whether its meaning was rooted in radical individualism, in human interconnectivity, or in larger moral structures; he grappled with the despair of losing one’s self in a godless cosmos, with the conflict between notions of free will and predestination and thus between belief and disbelief, with the idea that the physical world was a mirage, that one needed to punch through the pasteboard mask of surface things and grasp the underlying reality. Slavery, in a way, was the concrete manifestation of such metaphysical terrors, for it represented the same threat to real individuals as the possibility of a meaningless universe posed to the idea of the individual: obliteration.
    And so it is Pip, “the most insignificant of the Pequod’s crew,” told just before his near death that his labor is worth less than the energy produced by an animal’s oil, whose free will consists entirely of choosing between life on board a whale ship and life on an Alabama slave plantation (if he even had that choice; the terms of Pip’s service are not revealed), whom Melville has fully realize the implication of infinity: that man’s existence itself is insignificant. And it is Pip to whom Melville gives the power to see. What the rest of the crew thinks is babble is really an expression of his ability to take in everything all at once from every perspective; Melville has him going about the deck chanting a visionary conjugation: “I look, you look, he looks; we look, ye look, they look.”
    Melville read Darwin’s account of the voyage of HMS Beagle , most likely during his own sea travels in the early 1840s, when he visited many of the same shores and islands Darwin had less than a decade earlier. And Pip’s vision might have been inspired by one of its most dramatic passages.
    There is a section where Darwin, during his trek over the Andes at an altitude of about 7,000 feet, comes across a grove of calcified trees standing white and straight “like Lot’s wife.” He looks back behind him toward the pampas and realizes he is standing in what had once been a sea, a vast tectonic elevator that had been lifted up, brought down, and then raised up again. Darwin unfolds a quarter-billion-year history in a single burst:
I saw the spot where a cluster of fine trees once waved their branches on the shores of the Atlantic, when that ocean (now driven back 700 miles) came to the foot of the Andes. I saw that they had sprung from a volcanic soil which had been raised above the level of the sea, and that subsequently this dry land, with its upright trees, had been let down into the depths of the ocean. In these depths the formerly dry land was covered by sedimentary beds, and these again by enormous streams of submarine lava—one such mass attaining the thickness of a thousand feet; and these deluges of molten stone and aqueous deposits five times alternately had been