Otros ejemplos históricos de sistemas de numeración escritos

Building on the previous excursions, we may begin understanding Melville’s exegetical practice by considering contemporary ways in which the Biblical text has been understood prior to and during Melville’s lifetime. The voices in eighteenth-century European philosophy I surveyed above seem to contrast personal experience with the divine and abstract, dogmatic religious practice. This interpretative approach touts the romantic tropes of individual genius and Promethean perseverance. The Hebrew version of the text negotiates the distinction between dogma and personal religious experience by formally splitting the text in a prose prolog and a poetic conclusion. This formal arrangement mirrors the contemporary (second century, B.C.E.) dogmatic notion of the deity: God resides outside the universe and acts independently of its causality. However, by intervening in Job’s crisis and critically engaging the rivaling exegetical traditions presented by his friends, God transforms into a deity that can potentially be known by experience. The text therefore provides an occasion for Melville to break through the rigid notion of a mechanical, deterministic universe propagated in Calvinism and advocated well into the nineteenth century under the banner of natural theology.66

As an object of literary analysis, the Book of Job exposes a rift between nineteenth- century humanist sensibilities—in regards to what Thomas Paine had polemicized as the rights of man—and God’s problematic claim to universal wisdom, goodness, and justice. Stooping to conquer His creatures’ inferior Cartesian rational epistemology makes God appear morally ambivalent. It is all the more surprising that Melville, the alleged dyed-in-the-wool religious

Shelley, for instance, sees the merit of literature not in its ability to represent desires in relation to objects (420) but

rather in literature’s capacity for representing “desires themselves through their embodiment in an object that is not what they seek but simply a medium for their reflection back upon the self” (421, emphasis added).

66 _{Brumm postulates the presence of typological hermeneutics in Melville’s writing. More importantly,}

however, she argues that, “even though he quarreled with the God of the Calvinists, he never doubted that the world with all its features was a divine creation. For Melville, writing did not mean to create a world but to interpret the world” (196). William Paley famously condensed the argument for a mechanical universe into the watchmaker metaphor in Natural Theology (1802), 7.

skeptic, augments a reading of Job as a champion of Enlightenment humanism by using him to expose intellectual hypocrisy within said humanism. Melville carries his fascination with this contentious figure through all genres of his literary work, be it in the personal form of the thundering Ahab angling for a fight with the arbitrary deity that lashes out at him from behind the pasteboard mask, or in the more detached negotiation of the dispensation of justice by the narrators of White-Jacket and Billy Budd. He repeatedly addresses the inner machinations of religious and secular dogma, as well as the epistemological mechanism through which canonical and legal texts establish their authority over a community of believers. As such, the Biblical source text makes transparent the political and literary dimensions of dogma. Taking up the mantle of the romantic humanist, Melville comments extensively on the dogmatic function of secular legal documents, such as the naval codex in White-Jacket and Billy Budd, pagan rites and tribal culture in Typee, Omoo, Mardi, and even the Book of Nature in Moby-Dick and Battle- Pieces, and Clarel. He diagnoses the same mythical genealogy behind secular authority that he discerns behind religious dogma. It is thus unsurprising that Melville, like many other

eighteenth- and nineteenth-century commentators in the transatlantic region, found in the Bible a poignant vocabulary to articulate this critique.67

These early, nominal considerations of justice are succeeded by iconoclastic outburst, such as Moby-Dick, as well as subversive accounts marked by cautious legal manipulation, such as “Bartleby” and The Confidence-Man, the pondering of chance games and the insulating logic of technological security-thinking (“The Lightning-Rod Man”), and the linguistic emptying out of the discretionary function of verdicts in general (“The Happy Failure”). These multifarious

67 _{See Percy Shelley’s dramatic poem Prometheus Unbound (1820) epitomizes the Romantic investment in}

the Prometheus figure. The widely held interpretation of Ahab as a type of Prometheus, considered exegetically, can be read as the coercion of Job into the Promethean myth. Both symbols display mutual contact points and analogies that Melville moderates in Moby-Dick. I will address how he goes about this in a moment.

representations of legal systems as conflicting with morality keep Melville returning to the distinctly Joban and Ecclesiastical position of stressing how a codex of laws is incompatible with contingent living reality. Trying to apply the dead letter of the law to scenes of human life

always entails violent coercion, not only against the body but also against the very telos of law itself. This fundamental paradox in the sequence of dispensary justice—transgression,

punishment, and suffering—constitutes the Joban legal compliance in Melville’s writing.68