Tesla & P's Lightening-Rod Salesmen

[alice wellintown]

Terry Reilly's esay in _Corrupted Pilgrim_ is a wonderful analysis of the
Science/Occult, of, what Weisenberg, in his GR Companion, identies as the
points of connection between science/technology and
ritual/religion/occult/paranormal...

A brief discussion of Franklin, M&D, and then Reilly turns to AGTD, and
Merel Rideout's job as lightening rod salesman.

Melville's short story is important to this discussion.

A study of interest:


The Temporality of Allegory: Melville's "The Lightning-Rod Man"

Sean Silver

From: Arizona Quarterly: A Journal of American Literature, Culture, and
Theory

Volume 62, Number 1, Spring 2006

pp. 1-33


Melville's tale probably found such persistent acceptance because it is
generically recognizable. It is a salesman story, what Hershel Parker
identifies as a "little Berkshire salesman story," and it is as a salesman
story that it seems to have found its immediate legacy: bound up in
anthologies like Burton's *Cyclopaedia* that recycled compact stories with
a singleness of plot and a clear thematic task. As with the other salesman
stories in such collections, the straightforward thematic tension of "The
Lightning-Rod Man" develops between a hard-sell door-to-door peddler and an
acute consumer; the trick, in the salesman story, is for the prospective
buyer to figure out what the salesman is really selling; they are parables
of alert consumerism. The moral of the tale is always *caveat emptor.* **

On the other hand, for all its historical popularity, the experience of
reading "The Lightning-Rod Man," if a survey of the critical response is
any indication, is characterized by nothing so much as the sense that all
is not as it seems, here. For one thing, the salesman and his buyer are
talking about a lightning-rod, but their dialogue seems to be orbiting into
vocabularies not properly about lightning-rods: about Catholic indulgences,
or rosaries, or scepters, tri-forked things, and Leyden jars. And, more
telling, the sale of the rod never seems to turn on questions appropriate
to the purchase of a lightning-rod; questions of voltage differentials and
electrical resistance, of conductivity and the strange logic of electric
"fluid" never quite come up. This is partly to say that thematic desire is
very much like the critical desire that is implied in it; they both turn on
a question first put by Melville's narrator in the opening paragraph of the
tale: "what is that strange-looking walking-stick he carries?" (118, 122).
Whatever it is, it is more than just an every-day lightning-rod. In Ben
Kimpel's words, "obviously there is some allegory here" (30).

Yet, if it is an allegory, it is an allegory of a particularly New England
sort, allegory of the right sort, the Puritan sort of allegory. For "The
Lightning-Rod Man" declines to invent a fiction out of the raw material of
fancy. Instead, it insists on the literal fact of the lightning-rod as a
lightning-rod just as it insists on the historicity of its figures; it is
as much about the history of New England Protestantism as it is about one
of the principle challenges to New England Protestant theology: the advent
of the lightning-rod itself. Melville would have us know that a
lighting-rod is very much like an idol, and the lightning-rod consumer is
vulnerable to the charge of idolatry; placing trust in a lightning-rod is
very much like putting one's refuge in means and creatures rather than in
God. As such, an ethical consideration of the lightning-rod, in the New
England tradition of allegory, finds its most proper language in the
rhetoric of post-Calvinist theology.
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