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PARTISAN REVIEW
generated parthenogenetically from the imperial self?
A self in flight from sex and society lacks social explanations for evil
and room for sin. Confronted with forces out of control , in self and in
parental and social intercourse, it gives birth to what the science fiction
classic
Forbidden Planet
called "monsters from the id ." The monsters slain
by the self-made hero seem
to
come from without and take possession of the
self. In fact they are his own offspring.
"Among democratic nations ," wrote Tocqueville , "the sources of
poetry are grand, but not abundant. They are soon exhausted; and poets,
not finding the elements of the ideal in what is real and true, abandon them
entirely and create monsters .. . .I fear that the productions of democratic
poets may often be surcharged with immense and incoherent imagery, with
exaggerated descriptions and strange creations; and that their fantastic
brain-children may sometimes make us regret the world of reali ty ."
The heroes ofAmerican art surely created monsters . Charles Brockden
Brown's
Edgar Huntly
proclaimed itself the first American novel to turn
from European material to "the field of investigation opened to us by our
own country ." Brown's sleep-walking protagonist , double of a man who
has murdered his surrogate parents, discovers and slays Indian monsters in
the wilderness. If
Edgar Huntly
first projected the American individual into
the west,
Moby Dick
climaxed his history. And the thoughts of its hero ,
Melville tells "somnambulist" Ahab, "have created a creature in thee; and
he whose intense thinking makes him a Prometheus; a vulture feeds upon
that heart forever; that vulture the very creature he creates ."
The classic American literary monsters were not products of un–
grounded artistic fancy . Melville formed Promethean Ahab and his
Leviathan from the "real and true" major figures and symbols ofantebellum
politics, from Jackson and Calhoun, from the language of Bank War,
slavery and antislavery, and expansion. His romance did not invent
monomania; it rather illuminated its meaning-to choose only a single
theme, the meaning of Ahab's self-proclaimed repudiation of human
maternity and paternity .
,
If the self-made man generated his monster alter-ego, then his selfwas
a divided self. Divisions which fled from sex and society were reborn
within. The splintering of the father's household world bifurcating mar–
ketplace and family, divided the acquisitive, worldly, outer personality
from the secret self within . In David Bryan Davis's formulation, so heavily
indebted to Melville, mobile men lacking rooted, authenticating creden–
tials staged a smiling presentation of self in the marketplace. Their efforts
to win the confidence of others for their own self-aggrandizing schemes
created a crisis of confidence- Laing's ontological anxiety. Men themselves
