Review: <i>Melville’s Democracy: Radical Figuration and Political Form</i>, by Jennifer Greiman

Paroxysms of sovereign violence; colonialist rapine; the slave trade and slave insurrection; civil war; revolution; mutinies-asserted, disguised, suppressed-and desertion; settlement, migration, and exile in the New World and in the Holy Land; the micropolitics of social bonding: a squeeze of the hand, the wastage of pity, morbidities of trust and credit as exemplified by the sob story and the open palm.There is simply no corner of Melville's work that does not focus on politics as practice or theory.And yet, as Jennifer Greiman reminds us in her searching and absorbing book, Melville's Democracy: Radical Figuration and Political Form, there is nothing like consensus in the critical literature about what Melville's political ruminations add up to.Often, critics have gestured toward something called "democracy," though as my list above suggests, the values conventionally associated with that word are, in Melville's work, more honored in the breach, as if what concerned Melville most of all was understanding everything that can go wrong with democracy.And yet, Greiman asserts-and follows many others in assertingthat Melville's abiding political puzzle is democracy.The touchstone for this view used to be the ending of the "Knights and Squires" chapter of Moby-Dick, where Ishmael sings of "that democratic dignity which, on all hands, radiates without end from God; Himself!The great God absolute!The centre and circumference of all democracy.His omnipresence, our divine equality!"(qtd.p. 120).Invoking the Christian trope of God as He who has his center everywhere and his circumference nowhere, Melville casts the ground principle of democracy-equality-as a kind of paradoxical entity that is as omnipresent as it is unlimited.Greiman invokes this passage, but her central text is the famous letter to Hawthorne of May 1851, where Melville names a "ruthless