Dragooned! Ten Traces of
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Riffs William Gibson, USN Augustus Ely Silliman Texts by Anonymous |
6 NUMBER SIX collars two prisoners on the prairie and identifies them as Melville’s, with the help of the eighteen-point profile by Harrison Hayford in his brilliant essay on “Melville’s Prisoners,” first chapter in the book of the same title (published by Northwestern University Press in 2003 with a foreword by Hershel Parker). The plight of a “literal or virtual” prisoner, as Hayford demonstrates, surfaces repeatedly throughout Melville’s writings. This recurring prisoner motif appears most vividly in works published between 1851 and 1853, the time frame also of “Scenes Beyond the Western Border.” Quintessential expressions of the prisoner motif (or “cluster situation” involving, as Hayford shows, numerous related motifs) take the form of tableaux in Moby-Dick (1851), Pierre (1852), and “Bartleby” (1853). As Hayford reads it, the Hotel de Cluny tableau in chapter 41 of Moby-Dick presents “buried imprisonment” in the image of a “captive king” suffering under the weight of centuries, like “Enceladus the Titan with mountains piled on him” (5). Pierre ends with a tragical tableau of the hero as condemned prisoner, whose only escape is by assisted suicide. Bartleby ends up in the same New York prison (known as “The Tombs”) and dies “huddled up at the base of the wall.” In his final tableau, Bartleby confronts prison walls, as he formerly confronted interior and exterior walls of buildings on Wall Street.
Harrison Hayford on “Melville’s
Prisoners”
Two discrete interludes in “Scenes Beyond the Western Border,” both from the March 1853 installment in the Southern Literary Messenger, showcase the typical cluster situation discovered by Hayford. Each scene exhibits at least thirteen of Hayford’s eighteen associated motifs. Moreover, in a synoptic chapter heading, unique to this installment, the author gives each episode a title, printed in italics. The assigned titles convey the artificial, staged quality of these episodes, encouraging readers to view them, like the passages Hayford analyzes, as tableaux: A night-watch in the mountains, and a dialogue thereon (157-158); and Cub, a tragedy in three acts (159). Each scene features the essential elements of Prisoner, Prison, Superior, Confrontation, and Observer. Night-watch presents the Captain as a virtual prisoner of “mountains like prison-walls.” The Superior here is impersonal, blank space, the “profound silence” of a desert wasteland, which the Captain confronts all night long during his existentially lonely watch. In the revised book version, the Superior is personified as “dull tyrant space” that freezes the heart with “its stoniest frown” (386-7). The Observer is the narrator’s less than sympathetic friend, Frank. Hayford identifies two kinds of authentic “noble-souled” Prisoners in Melville, “the kind who stays facing up to the Superior and the kind who attacks it” (10). In the night-watch episode, the Captain represents the first kind; in Cub, the imprisoned bear cub represents the second kind. A night-watch in the mountains, and a dialogue thereon opens the March 1853 installment of “Scenes Beyond the Western Border” in the Southern Literary Messenger. This night-watch is a meditative and masterfully written set-piece in which the essential predicament of the brooding Captain of U. S. Dragoons is that of “Melville’s Prisoners” as outlined by Hayford.
The central figure is the Captain, depicted as a virtual prisoner on a prairie “Desert,” surrounded by massive mountains. The prison motif becomes explicit in the Captain’s observation of “mountains like prison-walls.” The Superior is impersonal, blank space, the “profound silence” of a desert wasteland—what Hayford calls “unpersonified heartless immensities.” Revisions of the 1853 text powerfully intensify the motif of confrontation with the mysterious, invisible, and silent higher power: in 1857 the Captain apostrophizes the stars and seraphim, and personifies the Superior figure as “dull tyrant space wear[ing] its stoniest frown.” Alone throughout his long night-watch, the Captain determines to face the void, though it break his mind. His lone confrontation with the awful silence, intensified by the imperturbability of Frank, his slumbering friend, yields this fine line, maybe the most haunting in the whole series:
The Observer is Frank, the Captain’s imaginary friend. Initially it is the Captain who watches Frank, who sleeps the night away. However, in the morning-after dialogue, Frank turns observer and commentator, representing the “callous” rather than “sympathetic” variety of Observer. Frank criticizes the depressing mood of the narrative so far and cryptically addresses the Captain as an “unintelligible lover of antithesis (not to say plagiarism).”
The Night-Watch and
Dialogue (March 1853) Motifs Associated with Prisoner... According to Hayford Present in night watch?
Motifs Associated with Scene...
Cub, also from the March 1853 installment, presents a captured grizzly bear cub as “the imprisoned hero” of a mock tragedy.
The Cub’s prison is a wagon, conceived as a theatrical stage. The Superior again is a force, embodied perhaps in the soldiers who actually captured the bear cub, or the actual prison wagon, but in a larger sense symbolizing vaster powers of oppression and enslavement. As recounted by the Captain, the history of the bear marks it as a stand-in for Melville’s Pierre, the book Pierre as well as its hero. References to brother and sister, an enraged “lady-mother,” imprisonment, hanging, “the author,” and critical reception by “the commentators” and “the future reader” are practically unintelligible without reference to Melville’s Pierre.
The Cub represents the attacking variety of true Prisoner, the kind who chooses to “move forward against the Superior, aggressively.” In Melville, as Hayford observes, “[a]gression is imaged as a movement, often sudden and violent, against the Superior.” True to form, the chained Cub threateningly howls at his jailers, represented as “much moved,” that is, alarmed or frightened, “spectators.” In the third act the Cub suddenly rebels, reducing the wooden stage “to splinters” in the violence of his attempted escape. Hayford finds that “thematically, aggression always fails; the blow rebounds—its result is self-destructive.” Thus did Pierre’s aggression fail, and thus do the impassioned outbursts of his allegorical equivalent, the bear cub, also fail. Cub finally leaps to his death, leaving only one ambiguity for “commentators” to wrestle with: did the victim drown or hang? Numerous “Observer” types in the guise of spectators and commentators surround the imprisoned bear-cub. Behind them stands another Observer—the narrating Captain, here the self-described author who would “immortalize” the Cub as a hero of resistance against the confining expectations of unappreciative contemporary audiences.
Cub, a tragedy in
three acts (March 1853) Motifs Associated with Prisoner... According to Hayford Present in Cub?
Motifs Associated with Scene...
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