If Melville were asked to single out the most sublime moment in Job while writingMoby-Dick,he would have undoubtedly pointed to God’s response from the storm, as do Burke, Herder, and Carlyle. The ultimate source of inspiration for Melville in 1851 is located in the climactic closing lines of the divine poem, where Leviathan is presented as the inscrutable, ungraspable epitome of crea-tion (Job 41). Melville’s distinct exegetical brilliance, however, does not lie in foregrounding Leviathan’s natural sublimity (a distinct poetic feat in itself) but rather in the unexpected projection of this poem onto the world of American whaling. Leviathan in Moby-Dick is at once a natural awesome wonder, an imaginary demonic-divine phantom – “the overwhelming idea of the great whale” − and a common commodity – caught, dissected, and sold in one of America’s largest industries. With unique Romantic irony and humor, Melville situates Joban sublimity between the metaphysical and the physical in ways that offer a decisive departure from his continental precursors. If Job can be regarded as “aesthetically noble,” claims Ishmael, in “The Advocate,” so can the supposedly “unpoetic” business of whaling with its infamous butchering.15 The refreshing redefinition of the boundaries between sacred writing and lit-erature – a redefinition brought about by the aesthetic turn in biblical exege-sis – should, Melville proposes in Moby-Dick, lead to an even more radical opening of concepts such as “aesthetic” and “sublime.”
15 Melville, Herman,Moby-Dick; or, The Whale, eds., Harrison Hayford, et al., Northwestern University Press and the Newberry Library, Evanston and Chicago (1851) 2001, 111.
Melville’s Wall Street Job: The Missing Cry 105 In “Bartleby,” Melville takes this sacrilegious aesthetic inquiry a step fur-ther. In leaving thePequodfor another quintessential American workplace – Wall Street – he ventures to bolster the moments of mock aesthetic and mock sublime inMoby-Dick, and goes so far as to question the very value and validity of any quest for sublimity in Job or beyond. Instead of playing with physical and metaphysical leviathans, instead of juxtaposing Job’s sorrows with the dazzling sights of Creation, Melville positions Chapter 3 – where the “kings and counsellors” appear – at the center of his canvas, regarding it as the most suitable Joban scene for the representation of human suffering in a city devoid of divine vigilance.
Job’s opening cry is one of the most resonant biblical poems. The innocent sufferer, no longer willing to bear his pain with equanimity, “opens his mouth”
and curses.
Let the day perish wherein I was born, And the night in which it was said, There is a man child conceived.
Let that day be darkness;
Let not God regard it from above, Neither let the light shine upon it;
Let darkness and the shadow of death stain it;
Let a cloud dwell upon it;
Let the blackness of the day terrify it. [...]
Lo, let that night be solitary, Let no joyful voice come therein.
Let them curse it that curse the day. [...]
Let the stars of the twilight thereof be dark;
Let it look for light but have none;
Neither let it see the dawning of the day:
Because it shut not up the doors of my mother’s womb, Nor hid sorrow from mine eyes.
Why died I not from the womb?
Why did I not give up the ghost when I came out of the belly?
Why did the knees prevent me?
Or why the breasts that I should suck?
For now should I have lain still and been quiet, I should have slept:
Then had I been at rest,
With kings and counsellors of the earth, Which built desolate places for themselves;
Or with princes that had gold, Who filled their houses with silver:
Or as an hidden untimely birth I had not been;
As infants which never saw light.
There the wicked cease from troubling;
And there the weary be at rest.
There the prisoners rest together;
They hear not the voice of the oppressor.
The small and the great are there;
And the servant is free from his master.
Wherefore is light given to him that is in misery, And life unto the bitter in soul;
Which long for death, but it cometh not;
And dig for it more than for hid treasures;
Which rejoice exceedingly, and are glad, when they can find the grave?
Why is light given to a man whose way is hid, And whom God hath hedged in?
For my sighing cometh before I eat,
And my roarings are poured out like the waters. (3:3–24)
Job probes the very limits of language and of life. The punishment for cursing God, according to biblical law, is death. Job does not actually curse God, as the Adversary had predicted he would, though he comes tantalizingly close to this abyss in imprecating the day of his birth, the divinely ordained gift of life. His blasphemy does not end here. It sweeps up a whole array of biblical configurations of creation, inverting the cosmic deeds of the Creator. In a bold act of de-creation (with its mythical echoes of Mesopotamian cosmogonic bat-tles), Job summons darkness, blackness, and clouds to hide the light of that cursed day, even its first twilight stars, and wishes that his cursing be rein-forced by magicians with the power to blot days from the calendar.16His curs-ing is a powerful cry of pain and rage, an exercise in not-becurs-ing, in self erasure.
If only the womb were a tomb, if only no breasts had welcomed him into the world. Death, the ultimate rest, is his only consolation. He abhors the thought of living in a world in which sorrows, sighs, and catastrophes pile up ceaseless-ly, in a world whose Creator is not a benevolent, just Judge but rather a grand Torturer who provides light and life only to “hedge in” mortals.
It is precisely this “hedged in,” grave-like setting that Melville reproduces through Wall Street. To be more precise, he literalizes the name of the district – in turning Wall Street into a site of walls – and superimposes onto this nine-teenth-century urban setting a Joban inscape. Consider the lawyer’s expository remarks concerning his chambers:
My chambers were up stairs at No. – Wall-street. At one end they looked upon the white wall of the interior of a spacious sky-light shaft, penetrating the building from top to bottom. This view might have been considered rather tame than otherwise, deficient in
16 See Robert Alter,The Art of Biblical Poetry,Basic Books, New York 1985, 76–84.
Melville’s Wall Street Job: The Missing Cry 107
what landscape painters call “life.” But if so, the view from the other end of my chambers offered, at least, a contrast, if nothing more. In that direction my windows commanded an unobstructed view of a lofty brick wall, black by age and everlasting shade; which wall required no spy-glass to bring out its lurking beauties, but for the benefit of all near-sighted spectators, was pushed up to within ten feet of my window panes. Owing to the great height of the surrounding buildings, and my chambers being on the second floor, the interval between this wall and mine not a little resembled a huge square cistern.17
This is among the tale’s most amusing mock aesthetic moments. The lawyer’s glorifying description of his chambers discloses the absurdities of a stifled of-fice blocked by walls from all sides. Ironically, the only “unobstructed view”
is the spectacle of two supposedly contrasting walls – the white wall of the shaft “deficient in what landscape painters call ‘life’” and the “aged” black brick wall. For all those who were ever eager to find natural sublimity in Job – Melville included, of course – these walls seem to offer a sobering sight: the greatest aesthetic advantage they hold lies in their capacity to “push up” their
“lurking beauties” close to their spectators while forming an airless cistern around them.
The lawyer, in many ways, is Wall Street’s counterpart to Job’s so-called friends. Like them, he finds the normative both justifiable and pleasurable. He sees neither the oppressive dimension of the architectural aesthetics of Wall Street nor the violence embedded in normative management practices. He in-sists on the beauty of his office chambers, much as he regards himself as a benevolent boss. (His counterpart in the Coen brothers’ Joban film “A Serious Man” is Rabbi Scott, the junior rabbi who perseveres in admiring the parking lot visible from his office window.)
As the primary Joban character in the tale, Bartleby introduces an anti-theodician perspective into these blocked vistas. Job, as one recalls, cherishes lightless graves and locked wombs as the most sought-for treasure of all. Bar-tleby follows suit in taking his dire condition ad absurdum, venerating the walls in which he is trapped as if they were the only objects worthy of reverie.
“Looking out, at his pale window behind the screen,” he immerses in long, immobile “dead-wall reveries.”18