Melville’s Leviathan
â€?It was the whiteness of the whale that above all things appalled me', Ishmael tells his readers, and that whiteness was not merely the violent force and preÂsumptive racial superiority of white supremacy, a force that Melville docuÂments assiduously, but that whiteness which â€?typifies the majesty of Justice in the ermine of the Judge', the steeds of kings and queens, and which appeared in many of the world's religions as â€?the symbol of the divine spotlessness of power'.
As Melville shows us time and time again, in almost all of this work, power is never spotless, be it royal, judicial, or democratic, and that observaÂtion takes on special importance as a historiographical reflection on the conÂtinuing history of law and empire in the author's time. Melville wrote amidst the initial ascendancy of American empire, and he would have seen first-hand the rhetoric of rights of commerce and navigation do the work of conquest in Hawai'i, reconstituting and mitigating the customary legal powers of indigeÂnous kingship and title, aiding the extension of American settler colonialism in the Pacific. He had certainly witnessed one of the most infamous holdouts of arbitrary judicial power in the form of the punitive cruelty of captains and officers on American ships. Among a great many other things, what Melville's greatest novel illuminates is the oceanic and imperial origins of a fundamental problem in the history of legal and political thought: that of the tension beÂtween the possession of rights and the exercise of discretion.That Melville highlights the authority of legal judgment as a key marker of sovereignty is clear, and that Hobbes' Leviathan helps him work that authority into his own narrative is equally apparent. In his previous novel Mardi, MelÂville's narrator embarks on a journey through a mythical chain of islands in the Pacific and experiences the vagaries of different approaches to wielding power.
He sets out carrying a copy of Hobbes. In Moby-Dick, Melville tells the story of a captain, Ahab, so bent on vengeance against the while whale who injured his body (and soul) that he takes charge of a whaling vessel to hunt the one whale, ignoring his legal responsibility to the ship's owners back on Nantucket and his lesser responsibility for the safety of the crew. Ahab asks for the authorization of the crew and officers in his quest, having them cross harpoons in a ceremoÂny, and telling them that they are now his arms and legs. It is an image strikÂingly evocative of the frontispiece of Leviathan. The first mate, Starbuck, repreÂsents the settler promise of individual conscience, propriety, and the binding1993) 137-76; Matthew Crow, ThomasJeJferson, Legal History, and the Art of Recollection (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2017).
authority of contract and the divine blessings of lawful commerce. Ahab disÂmisses Starbuck’s erstwhile pleas that they return to the certainty of their conÂtracted work: â€?who’s to doom’, he muses, â€?when the judge himself is dragged to the bar’?[924] Ultimately, Ahab’s question gets answered by the whale, who delivÂers equity to Ahab in the form of a drowning death while tied to the whale’s back. The ocean, as it did for King Cnut, returns here as a jurisdiction unto itÂself, a reminder about the limits of human law and sovereignty.
Leviathan, indeed. The beast of the deep. In that famous frontispiece, deÂsigned by Abraham Bosse, the artificial man that Hobbes goes on to theorise to great depth stands on the shore, facing inland, the sea clearly visible behind him in the printed version, wielding the sword of justice. The marine context seems important in light of the consolidation of state authority over the coast and the project of overseas empire going on at the time. The visage of Charles I, produced here two years after his death in 1649, is a haunting figure, and cerÂtainly one of the many other intriguing issues at stake in interpreting the text historically. Quentin Skinner has argued concerning the image on the frontisÂpiece that the title should not be taken as overly important, that beyond the rising from the sea â€?Hobbes had no further use for the idea of a sea monster’[925] Perhaps, although that seems unlikely for such a deliberate thinker. Either way, and more importantly, other thinkers certainly had use for such an idea, and that use is part of the meanings that texts and images can take on as they resurÂface beyond the context of their author’s intentions or even the context of their production. It might be two centuries later, in Melville’s hands, that the meaning of the image can be fully read and understood to have found its conÂtext, as a warning to sovereigns: never turn your back on the sea.