Abstract
This chapter focuses on the understanding of atheism that can be extracted from the writings of Herman Melville. After a preliminary discussion of the sociopolitical aspect of the matter, the author shows how Melville tried to express a metaphysical experience of “troubled atheism”. This kind of atheism amounts to the loss of faith in the logical coherence of the world, in the possibility of undistorted communication, and finally in the very stability of one’s own self. In order to reconstruct the nature of the troubled atheism, the author focuses on Melville’s phenomenology of the sea calm expounded in Mardi, as well as on his metaphysics of whiteness developed in Moby-Dick. Finally, rival strategies of dealing with this experience are discussed in the chapter.
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Notes
- 1.
For the reception of Typee and the controversies around the book, see Stern (1982).
- 2.
It is worth remembering that the whiteness or blankness as the noncolor of utmost terror reappears, among other places, in Melville’s work in the “pale face” of Bartleby, the scrivener, who is the passive (and hence even more terrifying) white whale on dry land. Having discovered that his strange employee, who is spreading his terrible blank calm over his office, actually lives on the premises and is not willing to let the lawyer in when he comes there on a Sunday, the narrator feels literally “unmanned”. However, this rather unequivocal reference to castration and the loss of sovereignty yields to an even deeper anxiety when—with Bartleby no longer around—the lawyer observes his own deserted office as Bartleby’s home, meditates upon the desperate loneliness of his employee, and imagines to see the city through the eyes of the pale scrivener as deserted or even ruined. Revealingly, after this melancholy meditation, the lawyer finds himself utterly “disqualified” from the service at Trinity Church he was planning to attend. The reason for this disqualification may be partly his feeling of guilt toward his employee, but perhaps, more importantly, it springs his realization that he himself is now guilty of the most terrible sin: namely, he realized that there is at least one creature in the universe that cannot be redeemed; in other words, that there is materiality beyond divine power. Confronted with the blankness of passive, irredeemable materiality—which, moreover, is embodied in and thus burdens with extreme suffering a human being one is unable to help—the lawyer passes the threshold of the troubled atheism (Melville 1997, 32–34).
References
Green, André. 2001. Life Narcissism, Death Narcissism. Trans. A. Weller. London: Free Associations Books.
Levinas, Emmanuel. 1978. Existence and Existents. Trans. Alphonso Lingis. Leiden: Martinus Nijhoff.
Melville, Herman. 1972. Typee: A Peep at Polynesian Life. London: Penguin Books.
———. 1979. White-Jacket, or the World in a Man-of-War. New York: The New American Library.
———. 1997. The Complete Shorter Fiction. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.
———. 2000. Omoo. Mineola: Dover Publications.
———. 2002. Moby-Dick. New York: W.W. Norton.
———. 2015. Mardi: And a Voyage Thither. Amazon Distribution.
Stern, Milton R., ed. 1982. Critical Essays on Herman Melville’s Typee. Boston: G.K. Hall.
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Lipszyc, A. (2020). The Visible Absence of Color: Herman Melville’s Troubled Atheism. In: Wróbel, S., Skonieczny, K. (eds) Atheism Revisited. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-34368-2_9
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