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Through madness, a work that seems to drown in the world, to reveal there its non-sense, and to transfigure itself with the features of pathology alone, actually engages within itself the world's time, masters it, and leads it; by the madness which interrupts it, a work of art opens a void, a moment of silence, a question without answer, provokes a breach without reconciliation where the world is forced to question itself. What is necessarily a profanation in the work of art returns to that point, and, in the time of that work swamped in madness, the world is made aware of its guilt.
--Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization
There is a wisdom that is woe; but there is a woe that is madness.
--Herman Melville, Moby-Dick
At the end of the Civil War, a conflict brought about "through the arts of the conspirators" by whom the "people of the South were cajoled into revolution," Herman Melville wrote of one of the dangers facing Reconstruction:
In imagination let us place ourselves in the unprecedented position of the Southerners--their position as regards the millions of ignorant manumitted slaves in their midst, for whom some of us now claim the suffrage. Let us be Christians toward our fellow-whites, as well as philanthropists toward the blacks, our fellow-men. In all things, and toward all, we are enjoined to do as we would be done by. Nor should we forget that benevolent desires, after passing a certain point, can not undertake their own fulfillment without incurring the risk of evils beyond those sought to be remedied.(1)
The essay in which this passage is contained--the "Supplement" to Melville's collection of poems Battle-Pieces and Aspects of the War--is a challenging one, and not wholly attractive to a contemporary viewpoint. Melville seems less concerned here with achieving equality for the former slave population than with easing the burden of defeat for the resentful Southern whites, who are, after all, "nearer to us in nature" (167) than are the blacks. But, as the scene above in which we are to "place ourselves" reveals, within that near relation there is still a crucial difference--the difference of victory and defeat that shows itself in Southern resentment. Resolving that difference is a necessary step toward fulfilling...