Meredith Farmer
For years critics have viewed Herman Melville’s Captain Ahab as the paradigm of a strong, controlling agent: “the supreme individualist of the nineteenth century” whose passions “fuse other men into instruments for his own egocentric will.”1 The story generally goes something like this: Ahab abuses his power by dragging his crew along on his obsessive quest after the infamous white whale. Then, in the end, everybody drowns. In Eric Wilson’s concise configuration, Ahab conscripts his entire world “into his monomaniacal projects and ends by killing his crew, save one.”2 But this critical consensus simply does not hold against the text of Moby-Dick.3 As the work in Ahab Unbound will explain, monomania was a medical diagnosis, not a political designation. The term actually signifies a weakness of the will. And when Ahab allegedly “fuses” other men into “instruments” of his “egocentric will,” he does it, specifically, by distributing emotions that “accumulated within the Leyden jar of his own magnetic life.”4 Instead of finding a dictator, we seem to find a structure that stores and then distributes charge. Finally, in the moment when Ahab allegedly murders his entire crew, we don’t find a cautionary tale about power or ideology. Instead we find a vortex, which is cast in the language of nineteenth-century hurricanes. At a time when meteorology was seen as one of America’s major contributions to science, everything in Moby-Dick gives way to a storm.
The chapters in this collection collectively prompt us to discover a very different Ahab: after brutally losing his leg in unfathomable working conditions, Ahab suffered from a mental illness that is still widely mischaracterized and misunderstood. He was physically disabled. He was constantly in pain. And he was malnourished. In the moment in “The Quarter-Deck” when Ahab is allegedly at the peak of his power, Ishmael describes him as a sort of battery that collects “fiery emotion”—then attempts to release it with hands that “nervously twitched” (165). And Ahab never murders anyone. When we actually reach the final scene of Moby-Dick, we discover that “concentric circles seized the lone boat itself, and all its crew.” Then “spinning”—specifically “animate and inanimate, all round and round in one vortex”—is the actor that unexpectedly “carried the smallest chip of the Pequod out of sight” (572).
This collection was motivated by a belief: we do not think the so-called Cold War frame should be our only way into reading Melville’s Moby-Dick.5 And in response to these alternative readings, we set out to rethink Ahab through a series of materialist frames, which have come to include atomism, vitalism, neuroscience, disability studies, animal studies, posthumanism, political theory, the medical humanities, and the environmental humanities. Our contributors leave Ahab’s position as a Cold War icon behind when they recast him as a contingent figure, transformed by his environment—by chemistry, electromagnetism, entomology, meteorology, diet, illness, pain, trauma, and neurons firing—in ways that unexpectedly force us to see him as worthy of our empathy and our compassion.6 Collectively these materialist readings challenge our ways of thinking about the boundaries of both persons and nations, along with the racist and environmental violence caused by “personhood” and by “the human.”
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In recent years, Melville has emerged as a center of gravity for materialist work. We mark the advent of this “materialist turn” with Samuel Otter’s Melville’s Anatomies (1999) and the attention it cast on Melville’s “corporeal obsessions” and “materialist analyses.”7 This began with a turn to material human bodies in texts like Branka Arsić’s Passive Constitutions (2007), Hester Blum’s The View from the Masthead (2008), Sianne Ngai’s Ugly Feelings (2009), and Amy Parsons’s work on “transnational labors” (2012), which pushed materialism in two different directions: toward classical Marxist theories of labor and toward materialist models of psychology, which framed thinking as inextricable from embodied feelings and performances.8 A second wave of readings moved past this interest in human bodies to consider a much wider range of things and creatures. Geoffrey Sanborn described “Melville and the Nonhuman World” (2013). Timothy Marr turned to “Melville’s Planetary Compass” (2013). And Richard King offered Ahab’s Rolling Sea: A Natural History of Moby-Dick (2019).9 Ahab Unbound helps initiate what we see as a third wave of materialist work, which draws on work in fields that include posthumanism, political theory, and disability studies to begin to articulate the implications of this turn.10 Our authors collectively demonstrate the extent to which ableism, racism, and other modes of discrimination depend upon arbitrary hierarchies of organic life and inorganic matter.
The four parts of Ahab Unbound build in scale from readings focused on parts and particles to broader political and cultural formations. Part I, “Ontologies,” situates Melville’s reconceptualization of bodies, agency, cognition, and life itself as occasions for thinking with Melville about materialism. Part II, “Relations,” in turn suggests that we think seriously about prosthetic personhood, directing attention to Ahab’s experiences of his missing limb, his phantom limb, his chronic pain, and, ultimately, his experience of a subjectivity that is collective. This shift reveals new possibilities for empathy and for compassion, even for a figure as maligned as Captain Ahab. In Part III, “Politics,” Melville’s rejection of antebellum accounts of the legal and medical structuring of life allows our authors to attend to his more democratic registers, which recognize and represent the empowerment of marginalized human and nonhuman actors. Finally, in Part IV, “New Melvilles,” our authors reach past Moby-Dick to focus on the materiality of Melville’s language in a broader range of work. They consider the ways that Melville’s writing—and often his literary devices—help us think about marginalization, raising questions about which subjects are fully alive and how we can translate between them. Ultimately, these chapters collectively engage with the ways that Melville’s language prompts readers to compose new texts and future worlds.
Our contributors pose questions that reach across a multitude of imagined borders and operate at different scales. They ask, how is Ahab like a tortoise? How might neuroscience help us understand Ahab’s attraction to Pip? How concerned should we be about Ahab’s diet? How does a more democratic relation to life depend, unexpectedly, on smell? And what would it look like to sail without Ahab—to sail, that is, into a future like the one imagined by the cybernetic punk group Devo?11 But when we suggest that our contributors reach past materialist description and into articulations of the cultural and political implications of the materialist turn, what we mean is that they collectively respond to Mel Y. Chen’s desire in Animacies to initiate a materialism that “has the capacity to rewrite conditions of intimacy, engendering different communalisms and revising biopolitical spheres.” Put another way: with the breakdown of the myth of a fixed divide between “subjects” and their alleged “environments,” we find new models of coexistence—Gilles Deleuze’s assemblages, Bruno Latour’s hybrids, and Karen Barad’s agential realism—which point to systems or actors that are “provisionally constituted” and “illusorily bounded.”12 And these different process-based ontologies—which collectively offer networks or assemblages that are perpetually decomposed and recomposed—inevitably push us to think differently about the regulatory control of both life and populations.
While this collection deliberately introduces diverse accounts of “materialism,” our goal is not to adjudicate between uses of this term. Instead, Ahab Unbound uses Ahab as a focal point to think rigorously about how different approaches converge—and stand at potentially productive cross-purposes. Put simply, our first goal is to rethink Ahab, or to unsettle what is arguably the only critical consensus about Moby-Dick: the myth of his strong, controlling, and even tyrannical will. (In fact, our hope is that readers will not be able to see Ahab in the same way after reading our table of contents.) But our second goal is to embrace the opportunity to collect and then give shape to the multitude of ways that “materialism” is being used to produce criticism in our current moment.
This introduction follows these two complementary goals. First “Ahab in the Atmosphere” begins the work of challenging traditional readings of Ahab, setting the stage for our contributors’ alternatives. Next “What We Talk about When We Talk about Materialism” establishes and situates our working definition of “materialism” in the midst of nonhuman, inhuman, and planetary turns. Subsequent subsections related to the book’s parts (“Ontologies,” “Relations,” “Politics,” and “New Melvilles”) offer detailed summaries of our authors’ contributions alongside the beginnings of a comparative analysis that lays out the ways that different critical approaches actually diverge and converge. Finally, “Captain Ahab and the Cold War” offers a more detailed account of the Cold War frame of Moby-Dick, which situates the ways this collection helps produce both a turn from and a return to the materialist readings that were visible before its rise to power.
We also wanted to offer an even more concrete response to four chapters of Moby-Dick that our contributors turn to over and over in especially interesting ways. Those chapters, perhaps not surprisingly, are “The Quarter-Deck,” “The Chart,” “Ahab and Starbuck in the Cabin,” and “A Squeeze of the Hand.” Here our goal was to draw out the complex relationships between our contributors’ chapters, actually offering a comparative analysis of the ways that different critical approaches yield different readings of chapters and topics that are touchstones for our authors. But this response to the project of helping Ahab become unbound vastly exceeds the scope of what can be accomplished in this short introduction. So in the spirit of continuing to generate the sorts of comparative work that these richly overlapping chapters make possible, we have situated this work on the Ahab Unbound website, ahabunbound.org, and will continue to produce and invite new content.
When Starbuck worries that the leak in the “hold” is the crew’s precious oil, Ahab cries, “Let it leak! I’m all aleak myself!” In fact, he indicates that everything is leaking: “Aye! leaks in leaks! not only full of leaky casks, but those leaky casks are in a leaky ship.” Here Ahab’s response to the problem of leaking is telling: “Yet I don’t stop to plug my leak; for who can find it in the deep-loaded hull; or how hope to plug it, even if found, in this life’s howling gale?” (474). One can hope to caulk a ship, but Ahab is less sure about bolstering himself against his stormy interior or the world around him. Ahab’s leak cannot be stopped because whatever “amplified fortifications” buttress his inner “citadel,” his character quite simply is not strong enough (348). Whether we read “him” as one of Latour’s hybrids, Deleuze’s assemblages, or Stacy Alaimo’s posthumanist selves, open to the world and “penetrated by all sorts of substances and material agencies,” one thing is clear.13 At the end of the day, Ahab is inextricable from his alleged “environment,” or to borrow from White-Jacket, he is more “universal absorber” than “impervious” coat.14 For example, we find—in the chapter named “Ahab”—that “as the sky grew less gloomy,” Ahab “began to grow a little genial.” In fact, “he became still less and less a recluse” until “by and by, it came to pass that he was almost continually in the air.” And when he finally goes out whaling, he and his environment merge: “He looked not unlike the weather horizon when a storm is coming up” (124, 161).
The power of Ahab’s atmosphere extends to electromagnetic exchanges. In fact, we see a similar pattern throughout Moby-Dick, where whales are like lightning for Ahab’s “howling gale.” Whales compel Ahab. Whales prompt his “leak.” And whales have a power that is like magnetic force. When all three boats manage to plunge their lines into one whale, for example, it stirs, and suddenly those lines “vibrated in the water, distinctly conducting upwards to them, as by magnetic wires, the life and death throbs of the whale, so that every oarsman felt them in his seat” (474, 356). When the Pequod needs to lower its lightning rods in “The Candles,” Ahab exclaims, “The white flame but lights the way to the White Whale!” This happens in the midst of an electromagnetic phenomenon: Saint Elmo’s fire.15 And during the gam or meeting with the Samuel Enderby, Ahab makes this connection explicit. He calls Moby Dick “all a magnet,” then adds, “What is best let alone, that accursed thing, is not always what least allures” (441).
Ahab also has the capacity to pass this charge along. When he asks his men, in “The Quarter-Deck,” what they do when they see a whale, their “impulsive rejoinder” is described as “hearty animation into which his unexpected question had so magnetically thrown them.” This moment—the first real assertion of his alleged strength—is, specifically, magnetic. And by the end of the chapter Ishmael concludes that “it seemed as though, by some nameless, interior volition, he would fain have shocked into them the same fiery emotion accumulated within the Leyden jar of his own magnetic life” (165). This “nameless, interior volition” may seem to reference Ahab’s interiority, as does the apparent autonomy of “his own magnetic life.” But, in fact, it only “seemed as though, by some nameless, interior volition,” he could act. The image of the Leyden jar subverts most notions of interiority. After all, it is ultimately just a tool for the corporeal storage of electromagnetic charge, collected from other agencies.
If we take this description seriously, the origin of Ahab’s charge seems to be a blend of lightning and other sources of magnetism. Ahab calls himself “Old Thunder!” He declares himself “lord of the level loadstone” (505, 519). And as we read in “The Needle,” “the magnetic energy, as developed in the mariner’s needle,” “is essentially one with the electricity beheld in heaven.” It is ultimately all one, singular force—which Ahab physically channels and expels with his breath. “Oh, thou clear spirit, of thy fire,” Ahab cries to the corpusants in “The Candles,” “thou madest me, and like a true child of fire, I breathe it back to thee.” This is followed by a stage direction that signals “sudden, repeated flashes of lightning.” And this is also the moment when Ahab explains that his “scar”—his “slender rod-like mark,” like the “perpendicular seam” sometimes made by “upper lightning”—did, in fact, come from this fire (123). So in thinking about Ahab’s alleged “agency” in “The Quarter-Deck,” we might be better served by considering Ahab’s influence, or the “full-forced shock” of his “electric” power. External agencies provide Ahab with the capacity to electrify the metal weapons of his mates and harpooners, along with most of the crew, Ishmael included (165–66).
This connection between thunder, lightning, howling gales, electricity, and magnetism makes perfect sense in the nineteenth century, amid popular and scientific discussions of atmospheric electricity.16 And these concerns about leaking—both watery leaks and electrical leaks—are counterintuitively about weather penetrating Ahab, as if the atmosphere were rushing in, eroding the possibility of anything resembling autonomy. Long before his leak is visible, after all, we find that “subtle agencies” related to the “weather” “wrought on Ahab’s texture” (126). And Ahab makes a similar point during the third day of “The Chase,” when he explains that if the “wind but had a body,” all his problems would be solved. In fact, one of Ahab’s final declarations is that of “all the things that most exasperate and outrage mortal man, all these things are bodiless, but only bodiless as objects, not as agents.” These subtle agencies—and here, specifically, “the wind”—may not have bodies like “visible objects” (564, 164). But for Ahab their agency is explicit and all too real.
These concerns about being subjected to the environment—and, specifically, the atmosphere—reach beyond Ahab and into the rest of Moby-Dick. In fact, they arise as early as the text’s second chapter, when Ishmael explains, in response to a “tempestuous wind,” “Yes, these eyes are windows, and this body of mine is the house. What a pity they didn’t stop up the chinks and the crannies though and thrust in a little lint here and there.” Ishmael frames his body as a system that can be overtaken by its environment. And throughout Melville’s work material bodies composed of atoms and elements are consistently portrayed as sharing porous borders with things beyond themselves. Ahab’s scar produced by lightning, for example, arrived specifically “not in the fury of any mortal fray, but in an elemental strife at sea” (123–24). And this treatment of Ahab as elemental even extends to his soul. In fact, the start of the very next chapter tells us that the “weather did not merely lend new spells and potencies to the outward world.” Instead it “turned upon the soul.” This is when we learn that “subtle agencies” “wrought on Ahab’s texture” (126).
From a humanist perspective, this may seem very strange. Here even human souls are framed as a porous collection of atoms and elements, which respond to electricity, magnetism, thunder, lightning, storms, wind, and air. Ahab is both a Leyden jar and “lord of the level loadstone,” or a magnetized mineral (519). He is neither autonomous nor a waif among forces. Instead he collects and redistributes charge, receiving and exerting influence. This portrayal is by no means unique to Ahab. It could also be applied to White-Jacket, Ishmael, or Pierre (among others). But this description seems more meaningful as an account of a figure who has been described as the “embodiment of the totalitarian type,” “bent on his own destruction and dragging his immediate world down with him with a despotic and utter disregard of them as individuals.”17 It is far from compatible with readings of Ahab as a “symbol of the self-enclosed individualism that, carried to its furthest extreme, brings disaster both upon itself and upon the group of which it is part.”18
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Framing Ahab as a figure who is consistently shaped by “subtle agencies” in his environment is clearly a reading for our moment. And in fact, when we are attentive to these materialist threads of Moby-Dick, it becomes important to ask: Doesn’t the text end with a vortex? Put another way: when “concentric circles seized the lone boat itself, and all its crew, and each floating oar, and every lance-pole, and spinning, animate and inanimate, all round and round in one vortex, carried the smallest chip of the Pequod out of sight,” can you find a cause—other than spinning? Or if you believe that something about Ahab leads to the death of his crew, do you actually mean to suggest that his will caused this vortex? While I do realize that fiction requires a suspension of disbelief, it is telling that for professional critics this all-consuming vortex often seems to be an afterthought: a mere effect of Ahab’s will. I would like, instead, to give some credit to the vortex, which is described using the same language as antebellum hurricanes.
What if the Pequod were hit by a storm? Ahab won’t stop to fix his “leak” amid “life’s howling gale.” And when he starts the story of his trip, Ishmael worries about not being able to defend against the weather. Melville directs us to hurricanes and waterspouts when he offers a detailed description of Ishmael analyzing a painting at the start of Moby-Dick’s third chapter, “The Spouter-Inn”: “It was only by diligent study and a series of systematic visits to it,” he tells us, “that you could any way arrive at an understanding of its purpose. Such unaccountable masses of shades and shadows, that at first you almost thought some ambitious young artist . . . had endeavored to delineate chaos bewitched” (12).19 But eventually, amid the apparent chaos, he offers “a final theory of my own, partly based upon the aggregated opinions of many aged persons with whom I conversed upon the subject. The picture represents a Cape-Horner in a great hurricane” while “an exasperated whale, purposing to spring clean over the craft, is in the enormous act of impaling himself upon the three mast-heads” (13). This description obviously resembles the end of Moby-Dick. And hurricanes were clearly on Melville’s mind.
When Moby-Dick was published, the “American Storm Controversy” had been running strong for thirty years. There were prolonged debates—heated, charged debates—about the causes and the nature of storms.20 William Redfield focused on whirlwinds or “rotary storms,” which involved particles that revolved around a vertical axis. For Redfield each storm was a gravity-driven, upward-moving “aerial vortex” reminiscent of Melville’s final scene. The paradigms for this model were hurricanes, tornadoes, tempests, typhoons, and waterspouts, which weren’t clearly defined or demarcated at the time (Fleming, 63).21 And Redfield—like Ishmael looking back to sort out the Fates’ “springs and motives”—would try to understand the mechanics of storms by piecing together the traces that each one left behind, carefully considering both sites of impact and any available journals, accounts, or reports that could help him reconstruct storms’ paths.22
Redfield’s language clearly resonates with Melville’s. For Redfield “prostrations” occur “chiefly under the closing action of the whirl” or the “closing action of the vortex” around a “vertical axis” (Redfield, 6, 11). Meanwhile Melville’s “ever contracting” “closing vortex” also spins around an “axis.” Redfield’s vortices are also “more clearly seen as we advance from the left-hand margin towards the centre” (Redfield, 56). And this is certainly one possible source for Melville’s play with the idea of Ishmael “floating on the margin of the ensuing scene” and drawn in slowly (573). Finally, Redfield’s obsessive mapping of the traces of storms, or his detailed analysis of sites of impact, seems to have seeped into Melville’s language. Redfield’s most famous sketches—and the ones that helped him determine that rotary storms like tornadoes and hurricanes blew counterclockwise—were of fallen trees. Ahab, in turn, declares to Starbuck, “Stand up amid the general hurricane, thy one tost sapling cannot” (164; Redfield, 26).23 This image of a “general hurricane” is the immediate background for the image of the “Leyden jar” of Ahab’s “own magnetic life.” And here, too, Melville draws on rhetoric and concepts borrowed from the American Storm Controversy. Redfield’s key interlocutor in these debates, Robert Hare, notably insisted that storms were caused by the buildup and release of static electricity in the atmosphere, which behaved just like a Leyden jar (Fleming, xviii, 26, 34, 38).24
Melville’s engagement with meteorological concepts is not limited to the language of the American Storm Controversy. We know he was aware of other important meteorological developments: he studied at the Albany Academy when it was the national center of work on meteorology, he lived near the first private weather observatory in the nation on Mount Greylock, and he read a related “official circular” by Matthew Fontaine Maury, which he cites directly in a footnote in Moby-Dick. That note contextualizes Ahab’s “wrinkled roll of yellowish sea charts,” supporting its plausibility with a note that “precisely such a chart is in course of completion” (199).25
Melville also repeatedly portrays ships threatened by the whirling of a vortex, hurricane, whirlpool, or typhoon. In Redburn “little vessels” are “obliterated from the face of the waters; the cry of the sailors ceasing with the last whirl of the whirlpool that closes over their craft.”26 In White-Jacket sailors find a hurricane at Cape Horn.27 In Moby-Dick we read about sailors encountering a typhoon (503). And Mardi offers a precursor to Moby-Dick’s vortex when, in the wake of a storm, we are told, “We floated a wreck.” Four days passed. And, finally, in a dream, we find Yillah “plunging into a vortex,” “descending into depths unknown.”28 This vortex returns in the final scene of Mardi. “Round and round,” Taji tells us, Yillah “circled in the deepest eddies.” Then finally her form “darted out of sight, and eddies whirled on as before.”29
So to borrow a question from Christopher Castiglia, “What would it look like to let Ahab off the hook?” At least as far as Moby-Dick’s concluding vortex is concerned, the combination of Melville’s access to work in meteorology, his clear use of both common and technical language about storms, and examples of similar storms in texts that have nothing to do with Ahab should be enough. Ahab may very well be dangerous. It is possible that he should not be the captain of a whaling ship.30 And the binary that we have used to frame the argument of this collection—totalitarian dictator or sympathetic figure—may be too polemical, too stark, and too strong.31 But Ahab is not a murderer. And that anthropocentric reading requires a substantial amount of denial about the importance, influence, and even agency of Melville’s nonhuman actors. Ahab Unbound aims to serve as a corrective, offering new readings that actually attend to the material world.
A decade of work has created a vague but palpable sense that matter deserves recognition. But as this work proliferates, we need greater definition. To give one especially powerful example, recent accounts of “nonhuman,” “inhuman,” and “planetary” turns are all characterized by vagueness and uncertainty. Geoffrey Sanborn explains that the “nonhuman” is expanding so quickly that its “key fact” is that “something” is “happening.”32 We read in the introduction to The Planetary Turn that “something is happening. Something is afoot.”33 And Dana Luciano and Mel Y. Chen seem to agree in “Queer Inhumanisms”: “something” about the inhuman, they tell us, “suggests unpredictability.”34
We appreciate this collective sense of possibility and generativity as new ideas unfold. But the uncertainty produced by what Castiglia describes as a “vertiginous series of turns” is one reason for reframing them as part of a broader “materialist turn” that (1) is robust enough to respond to this proliferation of overlapping concepts and readings, (2) resists privileging “the human” as its organizing principle, and (3) methodologically takes up a posthumanism that is symmetrical in its treatment of humans and other things or creatures.35 For us, the “materialist turn” designates a substratum (i.e., “matter”) that unites human and nonhuman categories, letting us look not just to atomism and vitalism—or stones, animals, and oceans—but to humans, who are also material structures affected by material environments. Its central claim is that for humans and nonhumans, “matter” is attended to as a condition of possibility for existence and experience.
While materialism is rapidly transforming literary criticism, we do not have the kind of systematic introduction and account that scholars need and want. On the surface our volume is about one author, text, and character. But that clear focal point has actually offered us the opportunity to begin to taxonomize the effects of cutting-edge materialist work. We find a number of important theoretical overviews across a spectrum of materialisms: The Nonhuman Turn (2015), The Planetary Turn (2015), New Materialisms (2010), “Queer Inhumanisms” (2015), Material Feminisms (2008), and The Affect Theory Reader (2010).36 Each of these collections seems to have considerable breadth, and topically this is certainly true. But methodologically each collection understandably describes a surprisingly narrow bandwidth. Our project, conversely, turns this structure on its head. We intentionally assemble scholars who bring a wide range of materialisms to bear on one well-known work of literature—which enables us, in turn, to begin to bring methodological distinctions into focus. In short, Melville’s famously fragmented, generative object of study enables us to produce a comparative analysis of different materialist methods and the accounts that they develop.37
Here it seems important to add that many of our authors work in departments outside literary studies in fields that include American studies, African American studies, political science, law, and religious studies. Several also have areas of focus outside American literature, including early modern literature, eighteenth-century British literature, and the environmental humanities. This range of backgrounds was intentional: our goal was to actually follow a thematically appropriate, planetary inclination to dissolve national, temporal, and disciplinary borders, which brought different valences to our contributors’ responses to Ahab. Their work may be united by a single author, a single text, and even a single character, but their content and their conceptual underpinnings are often radically different.
Part I, “Ontologies,” situates Melville’s reconceptualization of the body, cognition, agency, and even life itself as occasions for thinking with Melville about materialism.38 These chapters collectively imagine an ecomaterialist continuity of sensuous matter that stands in contrast to both Ahab’s alleged idealism and his “fleeting concentrations of power.” Here we find “subjects” who are not defined by thought. Instead they are material and, to borrow Christian Haines’s especially apt description in chapter 4, they are “always on the verge of dissolution into the impersonal wash of existence.” The risk here, of course, is of complete collapse into a flat ontology that makes it impossible to identify or differentiate between bodies—or to have anything resembling political agency. But the authors in this section collectively describe ontological models that account for individuated, identifiable, heterogeneous bodies and epigenetic brains. Ultimately those bodies resist both sides of the binary that this section produces: the risk of idealist commitments to form and the risk of an undifferentiated new materialist continuum. They offer these readings alongside considerations of the political and ethical reasons that we might want bodies to matter without agency ceasing to exist.
In “Sailing without Ahab,” Steve Mentz helps readers see Moby-Dick as the story of two opposed philosophical positions, represented by Ishmael and Ahab. Mentz begins by introducing Ahab’s trajectory as “singular, vitalist, and focused on forging multiple cyborg assemblages.” He frames Ahab as a cyborg who wants to “meet the universe . . . halfway,” specifically to increase his own power and range. And he describes this violent intimacy between matter and the human body as Ahab’s cyborgism. This model, Mentz explains, is based on strength, utility, and intentional action. But it resonates with work on human–nonhuman assemblages that we find in work by Donna Haraway, Bruno Latour, and Karen Barad. And yet for Mentz, Melville’s text also offers a series of “alternative” guides. His focus is on Ishmael, whom he situates as idealizing, truth-seeking, and invested in porous exchange. And in Ishmael’s ecomaterialism Mentz finds a precursor to the “blue humanities” whose thinking resonates with feminist ecomaterialist projects by thinkers like Rosi Braidotti, Stacy Alaimo, and Lowell Duckert. Subsequent guides include Queequeg, who offers a “queer multiracial utopian fantasy”; Bulkington, who offers “pure oceanic radicalism”; and potentially also Moby Dick, who—in contrast to Ahab’s alleged desire to contain everything—glides with “a gentle joyousness” and “shed off enticings.”
In general, for Mentz, Captain Ahab represents the dominant principle of direction in Melville’s oceanic epic. But through this experiment in turning attention away from viewing Ahab as the text’s egotistical center, we find a series of alternative and antityrannical poetics. Ultimately “Sailing without Ahab” explores the model of ontology that connects Ahab to both science and totalitarian politics—and the possibilities that would emerge if this reading were diminished. Here Mentz highlights an ecopoetics of entanglement with both the ocean and its more-than-human world, which he usefully frames as especially valuable in the Anthropocene.
In Branka Arsić’s “Ambiental Cogito: Ahab with Whales,” we encounter another divide between two competing ontologies. But now the contrast we find is between Ahab and nonhuman whales. Arsić’s Ahab offers an ontology that is grounded in radical idealism: life is immaterial and evacuated from the body, such that bodies have nothing to do with persons. Instead “persons” are removed from the material world, like the Cartesian “I.” So Ahab sees others as mere automatons vitalized by the living action of a thinking force. He imagines himself, in turn, as thought releasing itself from matter, breaking free from the confines of the body. And he does this by offering a description of thinking as “a coolness and a calmness” that could crack his skull and escape, like liquid turned to ice.
For Arsić, Ahab’s portrayal of vacated bodies is deeply problematic, since it is difficult to claim that violence like inflicting pain or violating a body’s integrity is unacceptable if bodies mean nothing to persons. But, like Mentz, Arsić offers an ecological alternative: specifically a “cetacean ontology” that is grounded in the lived experience of whales. She describes whale villi that experience heterogenous elements as a continuum of sensuous matter. Then she explains that whales prompt Ishmael to change his thinking about ontology or to develop a belief that permeable bodies without clear figuration don’t have to be frozen into a particular formation to be considered individuated, identifiable, and heterogeneous. Ishmael’s ontological theory is supplanted by his haptic experience, or what Arsić describes as an “ambiental cogito” performed in the moments when he squeezes sperm. In fact, Arsić argues, this experience of blending with malleable elements—of the total coincidence of his mind and his sensations—helps Ishmael refute both of his initial beliefs about ontology: that the body is inconsequential and that “inward mould[s]” give elements their form. In rejecting these beliefs, Ishmael embraces “an ontology of the continuity of living matter” that applies to him, to Ahab, and to whales.
In “Ahab after Agency,” Mark D. Noble pushes back against traditional readings of Ahab, arguing that he is less “a villain” than a plot device that troubles attempts to imagine power as a function of agency. Here Noble, like Mentz and Arsić, posits a two-stranded reading. One strand looks at Ahab’s claims to exceptional personal and political power, which drive the plot of Moby-Dick. And the second strand turns to the ways that Ahab repeatedly succumbs to febrile embodiments that threaten the coherence of agential claims. Here Noble expands on work by Mentz and Arsić by imagining the ways Ahab is shaped by Melville’s materialist alternatives. But then he changes tack, suggesting that framing Ahab as a posthumanist figure in the midst of “materialist disintegrations” only offers one part of an account of why Ahab’s agency matters.
For Noble, Melville’s dissolutions of individuated agency arise concomitantly with Ahab’s insistence that agential sovereignty stands apart from the logic of capital. And while Ahab acknowledges that bodies are hopelessly permeable and endlessly tradeable, he resists the idea that purposive labor must be so. Instead Noble’s Ahab chooses to detach from the crew’s common enterprise, pursuing not money but vengeance. And here his “conceit of autonomous agency” does stand out, unaffected by anything that happens to his body. While Arsić reads indifference to bodies as ontologically and ethically problematic, Noble adds an explicitly political dimension, considering that the ways that “agency come undone from the self”—or agency decoupled from the material world—is what offers Ahab “fleeting concentrations of power” that seem to be “the only plausible last gasp of resistance to a political economy that contends with no alternatives.” Ahab is surely wrong about agency, Noble concludes, but his intransigence draws our attention to what is frequently seen as the core problem of new materialism: that the dispossession of agential claims is often framed as inextricable from the dissolution of political agency.
While Noble shifts readers away from Ahab’s porous body and to his “conceit of autonomous agency,” in “Thinking with a Wrinkled Brow; or, Herman Melville, Catherine Malabou, and the Brains of New Materialism,” Christian P. Haines materializes that conceit, outlining a way that political agency and materialism might coexist. Haines breaks from the idea that thought must be disembodied and impersonal, arguing, instead, that Melville and Catherine Malabou share a premise when it comes to the material act of thinking: there is no thinking without a brain. This pushes back against what Haines frames as the new materialist tendency to abandon the subject as a site of thought, with apparent subjects always on the verge of some sort of imagined complete and total dissolution into the impersonal wash of experience. For Haines the ultimate fantasy of new materialists like Jane Bennett is the idea that even thinking becomes synonymous with matter. His argument, conversely, is that Melville shares Malabou’s project of narrating the material origins of thought. Following Malabou’s thinking about epigenetic structure, Haines explains that Melville sees our brain as what we do with it, offering a cognitively plastic Ahab who was never the same after meeting Moby Dick. Ultimately, for Haines, both Melville and Malabou support new materialism’s decentering of the human subject—that is, its undoing of the sovereignty of the subject with respect to the material universe. But they also refuse to decouple thought from the brain, insisting, instead, on thinking’s attachment to the vulnerable, organic creature.
In “Ontologies” ecocritical and posthumanist materialist disintegrations are repeatedly set against Ahab and his idealism, his impersonal thought, his conceit of agency, and his efforts to merge with the universe in ways that increase his own power and range. The first three chapters of this part offer fairly consistent, compatible readings, despite drawing on ecomaterialism, animal studies, and posthumanism, respectively. In short: as far as Ahab’s ontology is concerned, these do not seem to be differences that make a difference. Beyond Ahab, however, the goals of these readings are notably quite different. Mentz wants readers to locate alternatives to the dominant narrative that Ahab often represents, with the hope that diminishing Ahab’s centrality will make space for other readings that seem more crucial in the midst of the Anthropocene. “As the twenty-first century tallies up the cost of sailing under the flags of questing heroes and oil-seeking industries,” Mentz reminds us, it is helpful to find these kinds of alternatives in such an important text. Arsić wants more than alternative perspectives when she models Ishmael’s path to the abandonment of beliefs in idealism and forms. She works to explicitly challenge dualism—and, specifically, what she sees as beliefs that create vacated bodies and collections of passive matter that ultimately mean nothing to persons. (Of course, these also relate to the Anthropocene.) Then Noble turns to the economy. While Mentz and Arsić find hope in “A Squeeze of the Hand” and its production of alternative possibilities for noncognitive social relations, Noble thinks through one reason we might feel compelled to hold onto Ahab’s questionable conceit of agency: in the face of assemblages, hybrids, agential realism, and other invitations to intersubjectivity, the part of Ahab that stands apart from the material world is also the part that stands out as “the only plausible last gasp of resistance” to economic ends that would otherwise shape the Pequod’s journey. Noble wants this resistance, but at the same time he knows that the “materialist disintegrations” of agents seem to make it impossible. So his essay registers that apparent conflict between the desire to embrace materialism and the desire to have at least some degree of traditional, intentional agency. While these goals are very different, ultimately all three contributors explore the political and ethical implications of turning toward a flat ontology—away from Ahab and his sense of self.
While these three chapters collectively focus on representations of dualism—or the ways that Ahab’s thinking stands in opposition to materialist models that we find in Melville’s characters—Haines works to negotiate a balance between these two models or to reject idealism without accepting a completely flat ontology that does not leave space for contingent figures or formations. Like Arsić he makes a case for discernible actors. And like Noble he presents a symmetrical reading, which is to say that his thinking about materialism explicitly includes Ahab, who cannot think without a brain. Here Haines notably offers a materialist representation of Ahab that does not collapse into a flat ontology. Instead of what Haines describes as new materialist “dissolution into the impersonal wash of existence” (or the “continuum of sensuous matter” that Arsić attributes to whales), we find Arsić’s “ontology of the continuity of living matter” that seems aligned with what Arsić describes as permeable bodies without clear figuration that can be framed as individuated, identifiable, and heterogeneous. Ultimately, with the help of Malabou’s plasticity, Haines accounts for these permeable, contingent bodies, accepting materialism but pressuring the new materialist tendency to abandon the subject as a site of thought.
The chapters in Part II, “Relations,” work through the implications of this prosthetic personhood on a human scale. They direct our attention to representations of porous human bodies that are affected by their environments. But instead of focusing on atomism, vitalism, and epigenetics, they focus on Ahab as a disabled figure, considering his missing limb, his phantom limb, and his chronic pain. And instead of taking humans apart or focusing on the ecological, inhuman, and nonhuman elements that influence their bodies, these chapters concentrate on empathy, pain, internal conflicts, and compassion—or subjectivity. If the subject of “Ontologies” is the distinction between humanist and materialist approaches to what constitutes a human, the focus of “Relations” is on the relationships between self and others. Ultimately these different ways of thinking about representations of object-oriented intrapersonal conflicts (Snediker; Sbriglia) and material interpersonal connections (Benedí and Savarese; Castiglia) reveal new possibilities for empathy and for compassion, even for a figure as maligned as Captain Ahab.
When Ahab refuses to help the captain of the Rachel find his son, critics see evidence of a fundamental lack of empathy. But recent research points to two different kinds of empathy: deliberate or conscious cognitive empathy and automatic or unconscious emotional empathy. When Ahab refuses to help search for a lost child, his failure at the cognitive level is clear. But in “Phantom Empathy: Ahab and Mirror-Touch Synesthesia,” Pilar Martínez Benedí and Ralph James Savarese point out that Ahab also apologizes and withdraws to his cabin, following a common pattern for people with “too much emotional empathy.” Here Benedí and Savarese explain that scientists sometimes refer to emotional empathy as “contagion” because it spreads in ways that ignore self/other distinctions. Lower-level perceptual systems, they explain, conflate and merge, while higher-order systems parse and alienate. So sometimes others seem separate from us—and sometimes we process them as part of ourselves. Moby-Dick, in turn, defines and anatomizes only to shift into narrative that blurs and blends, overturning everything.
Ultimately Benedí and Savarese’s reading is not only about offering a more generous and far more empathetic reading of Captain Ahab. It is also about the ways Melville draws on “phantom phenomena” to interrogate the ways we come to know the Other. Here Benedí and Savarese focus on mirror-touch synesthesia; that is, people who consciously experience tactile sensations when they observe touch. They conclude with a reading of Ahab’s connection to Pip, which departs from troubling descriptions of Pip as a prosthetic and turns, instead, to the powerful ways this relationship is ultimately about touch. Here Benedí and Savarese explain that for Melville the Other can be experienced as sensory impression rather than a clear-cut and noxiously loaded social category. Touch, after all, is feeling that complicates most narratives, while sight leads to distinction and division. Against the grain of literary criticism that draws on neuroscience in an attempt to simplify our understanding of literature, Benedí and Savarese “insist on more complexity,” working not to diagnose Ahab but to help readers develop an appreciation for the role of the sensory in the novel, which helps us understand its persistent portrayals of conflation or merging.
Unlike most work on Moby-Dick and disability, Michael D. Snediker’s “Phenomenology beyond the Phantom Limb: Melvillean Figuration and Chronic Pain” is only incidentally about Ahab’s phantom limb. Instead his pages focus on chronic pain and its relationship to the verb “figures.” Snediker argues that the figurative lavishness of Moby-Dick illuminates an aspect of chronic pain that is phenomenological rather than descriptive. That is to say, it is about not how pain looks but how it feels; that is, “the difference between Ahab’s iconic ivory leg and the ‘sharp shooting pains in his bleeding stump.’” In many ways this resembles Benedí and Savarese’s thinking about lower-level perceptual systems, which conflate and merge in response to the experience of touch, and higher-order perceptual systems that parse and alienate, with their focus on sight and distinction. But Snediker pushes this account of Melville’s narrative that blurs and blends to a different level, finding language that is not representational. Instead, he explains, Moby-Dick’s roiling language enables Ishmael to convey inner life, abandoning what pain is for how pain feels—like abstract expressionism’s portrayal of realism as perceptual derangement, freed from mimetic paraphrase.
Snediker argues that like the fictively normalized body’s relation to constative language, chronic pain never quite serves its representational or descriptive function. Instead it generates and solicits—creates and searches for—a figurative animacy, or a lifelike form that is somehow between the self and an apparent part of the self. Put another way: for Snediker chronic pain differs from regular pain because in its iterations, in the ways it is experienced over and over, pain persists as an impingement that feels like a discontinuous object at the same time that it also feels like a continuous part of one’s self. After all, he explains, with chronic pain—his own or Ahab’s—there is no way to remember the beginning or visualize the end. Ultimately Snediker’s reading raises questions about when a chronic experience like pain can become either part of the self or an inseparable state of the self in the face of seemingly interminable duration.
In “‘The King Is a Thing’; or, Ahab as Subject of the Unconscious: A Lacanian Materialist Reading,” Russell Sbriglia also raises questions about “thing[s] from inner space” that are both inside and outside the subject. Sbriglia begins with Jane Bennett, whose flat ontology allegedly requires eliding subjectivity and its genesis. Then, like Haines, Sbriglia makes the genesis of subjectivity his subject. But, unlike for Haines, for Sbriglia the genesis of subjectivity is unexpectedly aligned with Bennett’s idea of “thing-power.” In Moby-Dick, Sbriglia tells us, things repeatedly exceed their status as objects and manifest traces of life. Here Sbriglia focuses on Ahab’s seemingly inert, iconic ivory leg. He argues that Ahab’s leg has an “undead vitality” that is best understood through a Lacanian materialist model that will make it essential to the formation of his subjectivity.
To understand Ahab’s constitution as a subject, Sbriglia turns to the famous moment when Ahab’s thoughts create a creature in “The Chart.” But this is not another reading of immaterial thought that escapes the skull, rendering the body irrelevant. Instead, for Sbriglia this emergent creature has a “vital materiality of its own”; it is something “unbidden and unfathered” and unborn because it is unconscious. In a very different register from Benedí and Savarese’s account of nonconscious processes, Sbriglia explains, following Lacan, that Ahab’s ego is not an active agent. Instead his unconscious is the thing that thinks. So when Ahab becomes a “vacated thing,” “he” becomes a subject: subjugated and passive. Sbriglia reads this “‘nameless, inscrutable, unearthly thing’ (un)born of Ahab’s unconscious thought” as what Slavoj Žižek calls a “thing from inner space”: an object correlate that is simultaneously inside and outside the subject. And this material stand-in for the subject in the symbolic realm castrates the subject, rendering it impotent, like Ahab’s prosthetic leg all but piercing his groin. Although “The Cassock” has attracted the attention of most psychoanalytic readings of Moby-Dick, for Sbriglia Ahab’s leg is a far better instance of the signification of the phallus. In fact, while critics often turn to Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, who posit a “body without organs,” Sbriglia finds that Melville was less interested in the deterritorialization of Ahab’s subjectivity than in Žižek’s “organ without a body,” or the way subjectivity persists in undead organs that embody unconscious thought.
Moby-Dick could not exist without Ahab’s lost leg. But it is not only a story about disability. Instead, as Christopher Castiglia explains in “Approaching Ahab Blind,” it is a story told from within disability. After all, Ishmael is struggling with chronic depression. And he tries, through Ahab’s story, to understand the causes and consequences of disability, including his own. At times Ishmael displaces his own experience onto Ahab. But he also turns away from disability, offering “philosophical flourishes” and “vague” descriptions that we might see as rhetorical equivalents to Ahab’s rage. Here Castiglia identifies a telling pattern: the more pronounced the disability that Ishmael encounters, the more he retreats into high-flying philosophical flourishes. But Ishmael’s response to encountering disability is also generative. It leads to Moby-Dick’s defining style, with its breaks, digressions, halting plots, and incidental anecdotes. And in some moments Ishmael also offers direct, sympathetic responses to Ahab’s “affective isolation” and subsequent frustration, embarrassment, resentment, periodic depression, and anger.
Working to actually process both Ishmael’s style and Ahab’s affects prompts Castiglia to offer a powerful “coming-out narrative” about becoming legally blind. He explains that Ishmael’s reactions helped him feel less alone. Then he adds that he recognizes a similar structure of feeling in Ahab. Here Castiglia recounts the moment Ahab realizes Captain Boomer lost a limb to Moby Dick. Ahab, overcome by excitement, forgets that he can’t walk on deck without accommodations. So landing on the Samuel Enderby leaves him startled, confused, and feeling out of place. This is familiar to Castiglia, who describes his own excruciating experience at a conference. “Embarrassed, confused, reduced, hopeless,” he tells us, “I found myself in the same boat as Ahab.” Castiglia concludes by suggesting that compassion may be the best way to prevent the catastrophe experienced by the crew of the Pequod. “Compassion,” he explains, means “to undergo together.” It references situations where vulnerabilities may not be equivalent but are “affectively proximate.” We should, Castiglia concludes, give ourselves over to transformative, compassionate attachments if we want to avoid going down with the ship.
In “Ontologies,” Noble explains that Ahab begins to look less like a villain or someone worthy of sympathy than a plot device that troubles our thinking about agency. In “Relations,” we find Snediker’s important extension of this question—whether Ahab should actually be treated like a human—alongside chapters that use this equivalence to great effect, pushing us to think differently about our motivations, our empathy, and our compassion.39 Two of these chapters are shaped by psychoanalytic accounts of unconscious drives and defense mechanisms (Sbriglia; Castiglia), and two are shaped by models of noncognitive, perceptual reactions (Benedí and Savarese; Snediker). But all four chapters offer accounts that are noncognitive—at least until Castiglia’s concluding call for an intentional turn to compassion as a deliberate strategy for avoiding interpersonal catastrophe. Snediker thinks phenomenologically about the experience of pain, which precedes conceptual work and narrative labels. Benedí and Savarese turn to neuroscience and find models of nonconscious processes, like emotional empathy as opposed to cognitive empathy. Sbriglia draws on “The Chart” to situate Ahab as a source for thinking about subjects that are produced by an unconscious that shapes and subjugates them. And the unconscious also looms large when Castiglia reads Ishmael’s philosophical flourishes as displacements. In many ways Castiglia’s reading is similar to what we find in Benedí and Savarese. The authors of both chapters turn to gams to situate Ahab’s problematic interactions with other people. Then they complicate those relations in ways that push us to rethink the empathy or compassion that we offer Ahab. But Benedí and Savarese describe the mechanism of emotional empathy, and Castiglia calls for an intentional turn to compassion—experiencing or undergoing something together. This reading places more confidence in both cognition and the representational power of language.
Benedí and Savarese consider the ways that Moby-Dick defines and anatomizes objects, only to shift into nonrepresentational narrative styles that blur and blend, confusing and overturning distinctions. Snediker notably offers a similar account in his reading of the “figurative lavishness of Moby-Dick,” or the ways Melville’s “roiling language” lets Ishmael convey “not what pain is . . . but how pain feels,” abandoning the cognitive level for an expression of his “inner life.” But for Castiglia and Sbriglia the work of the unconscious seems more closely linked to narrative than to sensation. In fact, when Castiglia turns to narrative, his divide is not between touch and vision, perception and cognition, or experience and definition. Instead of thinking about the ways Melville uses language to convey emotions or to disrupt categorical knowledge, Castiglia reads Moby-Dick’s breaks, awkward digressions, halting plots, and incidental anecdotes as symptoms that make Ishmael’s interiority available as signs that can be read. He even imagines language that helps convey inexpressible experience, which creates a sort of “disability aesthetics.” In the first two instances, Melville’s language helps him evade the problematic products of the cognitive realm, or stabilizing labels, while in the third instance it helps produce a new and potentially productive category. This contrast pairs the cognitive realm with political agency and the noncognitive, perceptual, or experiential realm with the hope of escape from problematic distinctions, a contrast that will return at the start of Part III, “Politics,” with Bonnie Honig’s response to Eric Santner’s psychoanalytic reading.
In Part III, “Politics,” Melville’s rejection of the legal and medical structuring of life allows our authors to attend to his more democratic registers, which recognize and then empower marginalized human and nonhuman figures. In each of these chapters impalpable material processes accounted for by antebellum work in science and medicine—from electromagnetism and phase changes to materialist psychology and digestion—help our authors think differently about the possibility of political agency. This takes very different forms. Vapors that cannot be captured or contained take on a kind of fugitivity that enables them to escape the social contract. Electromagnetic currents prompt the formation of new and perpetually shifting assemblages, which evade the constraints of both economic contracts and any sort of constitution as a biopolity. And antebellum diseases like scurvy, nostalgia, and monomania raise questions about crime, punishment, and sanity—or whether humans are always responsible for their actions. To some degree these chapters all focus on humans. But they do that work by focusing on humans’ biocultural existence, not for itself but for the purposes of reconsidering broader medical, legal, political, and economic structures. These chapters also collectively wrestle with questions about sovereignty, or how to reconcile materialist models of perpetually shifting human assemblages with the consolidation required for any sort of intentional action or political agency.
As “new” materialism gains a following, some critics are concerned with the importance of “old” materialism. Paul Rekret asks how capitalist social relations fit in. Eric Santner turns to metaphors like “getting under our skin” to think about the ways that sovereignty can be metabolized through human flesh. In “‘This Post-Mortemizing of the Whale’: The Vapors of Materialism, New and Old,” Bonnie Honig argues that Moby-Dick offers critical resources for responding to objections from classical materialists, especially through its turn to animal flesh. Honig describes three uses of whale flesh in Moby-Dick. Ahab’s world is shaped by political theology: his obsessive pursuit of the white whale is a search for both vengeance and meaning. For Starbuck, considerations of political economy dominate. The whale is a commodity, and the voyage is a commercial venture. But the crew’s use of whale flesh is democratic materialist.
To frame this democratic materialism, Honig describes the way that, as sailors squeeze at the fleshpots, parts of the whale flesh escape into vapors that cannot be captured or contained. And when vapor escapes both commodity’s grasp and the strictures of form, Honig sees its formlessness as a kind of fugitivity. Becoming a perverse stowaway, it hides in the air, and some of it becomes a part of the crew’s biocultural existence. The crew is invited to become part of the vapor and in that way to gain the power to vaporize all the orderings that claim to make sense of the world and underwrite its conventional hierarchies. Ultimately, for Honig, this site of whale flesh and its fugitivity become a source of inspiration for democratic theory, rooted not in the crew’s labor or homosocial interactions but in the shapelessness to which the evaporated whale flesh calls attention. Thomas Hobbes’s materialism leaves open the question of whether matter may act on us and of how we may find power in such materialism, perhaps even seeking it out in an effort to detach ourselves from inherited or imposed shapes and open ourselves to new forms and futures. But Honig ends by expressing a concern that parallels Noble’s thinking about Ahab’s last stand against the market economy: democratic agency cannot depend only on working our way out of the problem of sovereignty. We have to work our way back into it.
Donald E. Pease begins “Ahab’s Electromagnetic Constitution” with an account of the ways that new materialism emerged as a reaction to the linguistic turn that could impact core tenets of the U.S. social contract: bounded, self-interested individuals and a cohesive body politic. Then he stages a debate between Jane Bennett and Eric Santner, ultimately concluding that historical and new materialism should work together. To support this argument Pease offers a detailed and powerful new reading of “The Quarter-Deck,” which combines Santner’s account of this scene as a public ritual of symbolic investiture with my argument that this scene is based on the rhetoric and style of dramatic experiments performed during scientific lectures on electromagnetism.
Pease begins this remarkable tour de force by explaining that when Ahab poses questions to the crew, their responses take the form of an electromagnetic current. That energy fuses with Ahab’s, and as a shifting assemblage they evade the constraints of both their economic contracts and their constitution as a biopolity. Ahab offers his famous gold doubloon to materialize this new relationship, aligning the crew’s economic interest with their new field of energy investments. Starbuck famously holds out, jeopardizing Ahab’s experiment. But Ahab does not respond as a commanding officer. He does not even speak to Starbuck. Instead he responds from within the force field that he and his shipmates have cocreated, speaking as the representative of the alternative demos he has constructed with the crew—and entreating Starbuck to join them. “The crew, man, the crew! Are they not one and all with Ahab?” This is when Ahab asks the men to “splice hands,” and in this moment, Pease tells us, he represents the will of the assemblage. The mission is not an imposition of Ahab’s tyrannical will or an expression of the crew’s will—it is the shared coproduction of both.
Ultimately Pease draws on Latour’s notion of a “trial of force” to reframe Ahab as both the author of an electromagnetic experiment and the spokesperson for the assemblage that takes shape during the course of that experiment. He explains that Ahab does not impose the Pequod’s revised purpose; instead he stages the conditions that facilitate a change. Readings of Ahab as despot give way to understandings of Ahab as the representative of the body he cogenerates. In short, Pease’s reading seems to offer the model of both materialist and democratic agency that Honig calls for.
In “The Whiteness of the Will: Ahab and the Matter of Monomania,” Jonathan D. S. Schroeder crucially reminds us that “monomania” was a clinical term that frames Ahab as the opposite of an autonomous, intentional agent. He is driven to destruction by a compulsive fixation on one material object. Schroeder traces this concept through medicine and the law to pose such pressing questions as, Who is an agent? Who is responsible for a crime? How can responsibility be more properly allocated? And how do both medicine and law create racial and natural hierarchies of life? In reading the novel as a rebuttal to Melville’s father-in-law, Lemuel Shaw, Schroeder’s chapter opens with the case of Abner Rogers, a convict at the Massachusetts State Prison who stabbed his warden to death in 1843 but was found not guilty, by reason of insanity. At the heart of the case was the very concept that Melville used to create Ahab: monomania. Shaw presided, stating that Rogers was not guilty because at the time of the murder he had been temporarily insane, governed by an “irresistible impulse.” Here Schroeder points out that Ahab would also be acquitted on the grounds of insanity. After all, he is described as a monomaniac fifteen times.
And yet Schroeder’s crucial turn toward monomania is not only about Ahab “on trial.” Instead Schroeder compellingly turns to race and ethnicity, explaining that the overwhelming majority of individuals diagnosed as monomaniacs were either ethnic or nonwhite working-class laborers. Here Schroeder offers a fascinating new history: instead of turning to the usual suspects targeted by Enlightenment medical geography (mariners, soldiers, and slaves), Melville turns to a Nantucket Quaker, and in the process he frames Ahab as a figure who is, unexpectedly, both Protestant and ethnic. To do this Schroeder explains that for medical geographers, populations of people living on land whose agriculture couldn’t sustain them (like Scottish Highlanders and Swiss mountaineers, whose young men were sent to work elsewhere) were more likely to develop imbalanced temperaments. They were framed as the more feeling, less rational white ethnic prototypes in European literature. And they were far more likely to be diagnosed as monomaniacs. Melville situates Quaker whalers in the same way, describing not pacifists but “fighting Quakers . . . with a vengeance,” who—after failing to be self-sufficient—were sent off on whaling voyages. Ultimately Schroeder offers a compelling, original, and important account of the history and alleged cultural origin of Ahab’s ethnic “white rage.”
In “Diet on the Pequod and the Wreck of Reason,” Jonathan Lamb argues that Ahab personifies the idea of a mind that triumphs over bodily frailty. Lamb suggests that Ahab ought to suffer from both scurvy and nostalgia (a pathological desire to return home), but instead he uses Ahab’s dissolution to explore the degree to which the will might maintain the illusion of authority over diseases. Most of the starving members of the Pequod’s crew eat the flesh of their prey (i.e., whales) to survive. But Ahab requires nothing more than what he already contains. He is compared to a hibernating bear. And Lamb’s argument, in a fascinating addition to Schroeder’s consideration of Ahab’s failed self-sufficiency as a Nantucket Quaker, is that Ahab refuses these sensory inputs to define himself as a self-sufficient, thinking thing. Ahab knows that whaling has shattered him physically. And if he were to remain in the empirical world of solid objects and sense impressions, then he would be subject to the powerful forces that already contradicted his will. Instead he turns to another frame, reducing sensible experience to the bare level of insignificance. “All visible objects,” Ahab tells us, are only “pasteboard masks.” And in their place he develops a fantasy of himself, not full of food but replete with his own “inaccessible being.”
In ways that compellingly resonate with what we see in chapters by Noble and Arsić, Lamb’s Ahab doesn’t know that his reason is the captive of his frenzy or his fatal obsession. But here Lamb offers a new and important distinction: Ahab does know that his body is affected by scorbutic nostalgia. Lamb even explains that Ahab performs three of the symptoms of scurvy—nostalgia, tears, and calenture—not as a result of his illness but in an attempt to demonstrate his mastery over scurvy and any other illness. (Ahab, it seems, cannot be swerved.)
Lamb situates this reading of Ahab’s dualism within two especially notable contexts. The first is Schroeder’s reading of Melville’s poem “On a Natural Monument in a Field of Georgia,” which describes heroic soldiers who were able to resist breakdowns during the fatal stages of scurvy and starvation. And the second is Melville’s explicit engagement with scurvy in Typee and Omoo. For Lamb these clear references prompt this question: Why doesn’t Melville explicitly address scurvy in Moby-Dick? Lamb’s answer is that Melville made a choice to focus not on a human scale or on questions about food but on a broader opposition between being full and being empty—the kind of self-sufficiency that both Ahab and the Pequod appear ideally to exhibit and the loss that the vessel Rachel is vainly seeking to restore.
Honig, Pease, and Schroeder all consider Melville’s thinking about fugitivity and escape. In Honig’s words, “as vapor, the whale flesh embraces the formlessness its antiliquifying globules earlier resisted, and that formlessness is here intensified as a kind of fugitivity. Going from globule to liquid to air, the whale flesh responds to manual manipulation by becoming a perverse stowaway. Hiding in the air breathed by the crew, it occupies them when they inhale it.” Whether by way of smell (Honig), electromagnetism (Pease), or physiological and etiological accounts of disease (Lamb and Schroeder), we find investments in escape, which are paired with the evasion of categories and labels. For Honig vapors escape both commodification and the social contract. For Pease electromagnetic currents prompt the formation of new and perpetually shifting assemblages, which evade the constraints of both economic contracts and any sort of constitution as a biopolity. And for Schroeder and Lamb diseases like monomania and scurvy raise questions about the legal system at a time when the emerging field of medical jurisprudence was challenging people’s thinking about whether humans could really be seen as in control of and responsible for their actions. These investments in escape are also inextricable from portrayals of materialism’s ability to either generate or reveal the need for political alternatives, as we see with Honig’s fugitivity, Pease’s demos, and Schroeder’s resistance to antebellum law.
For much of this volume the experiential realm of materialism and the experience of touch have been paired with passivity, while idealism’s forms and cognitive work, including categorical thinking, have been paired with the possibility of agency. This seems to continue in Lamb and Schroeder’s work on the history of medicine. At least, for Lamb, Ahab’s agency comes from framing himself as a self-sufficient thinking thing, exactly to escape feeling controlled by the material world that has caused him a considerable amount of pain. Then Schroeder frames Ahab’s monomania as a disease caused by a lack of self-sufficiency. But in the essays in Part III, things also take a turn. For Honig and Pease, materialist thinking is explicitly linked with the escape from political and biopolitical problems. And while this might not rise to the level of constituting “agency,” it isn’t passive either. In fact, for both of these authors, subjugation to various biopolitical regimes becomes aligned with passivity instead. So Honig’s and Pease’s essays trouble any easy pairings of experiential passivity and cognitive agency. Pease also offers a materialist alternative that can be paired with agency like Haines’s neuroplasticity. Put another way: these authors challenge the idea that this binary between passive materialism and its active agential alternatives holds as we shift between scales.
In Part IV, “New Melvilles,” Matthew A. Taylor, Colin Dayan, Ivy Wilson, and John Modern reach beyond Ahab, engaging with other literary environments. They turn, that is, to a broader representation of Melville’s other bodies in pain: to nonhuman animals, racialized figures, abjected laborers, and many of Melville’s readers. The three chapters that anchor this section focus on the materiality of language—specifically, on the ways that Melville’s language can be used in and for the future. Two (Dayan, Wilson) turn to literary devices to think about what readers might learn from careful attention to Melville’s aesthetic work or form. In the process they engage with questions about the history of exclusion, along with the impossibility of translating between social orders. Then the final chapter (Modern) treats Moby-Dick as a diachronic object, focusing on the ways that its language continues to resonate across time. Ultimately this part frames the remarkable way that Melville’s language elicits readings that compose new texts and future worlds.
“Where does Ahab go when he dies?” Matthew A. Taylor poses this question only to answer, unexpectedly, that at death wicked sea captains are allegedly “transformed into tortoises”—a piece of sailor lore borrowed from “The Encantadas.” And in “Ahab’s After-Life: The Tortoises of ‘The Encantadas’” Taylor uses it as an occasion for thinking through the implications of Melville’s conception of the afterlife. Here questions about where Ahab goes—or any interest in his reincarnation—are replaced by a more fundamental question: What does it mean to say that Ahab lived or died at all? And instead of framing life as a state that precedes death, Taylor argues that for Melville, life and death are distinct but also indissociable, comorbid, and coterminal. Taylor’s Melville imagines “an immanent lethality that vitiates all life.” In the process he challenges the premises of both the optimistic evolutionary theories of his moment and the affirmative, biocentric, neovitalistic philosophies that animate our own.
Confounding any effort to ground a positive ethics or politics in life or in death, Taylor’s Melville is of no use for readings like Mentz’s discovery of a voice that will be helpful in the Anthropocene. Instead Taylor’s Melville preemptively imagines a pre-Freudian death drive entombing all of existence, acknowledging life’s irrevocable decay, or the irreversible ruination of the world. Taylor counterintuitively works to “reanimate” this necrovitalism. In the process he frames “The Encantadas” as death-like, without inhabitants or history, full of wandering ghosts. Melville’s “curly-headed glories” in the moment that “Life folded Death” and “Death trellised Life” become grave-born and stillborn. And the “riotocracy” of cannibalism is universal. To conclude, Taylor asks whether Ahab’s “earthquake life” (507) is actually his own. With the help of other readings of impersonal life that makes us dead to ourselves (like Arsić’s account in this volume), he finds a world where “life holds thee; not thou it,” concluding, in turn, that Melville’s thinking is animated by an insistence that death is always already present in life. For Taylor the real effect of this ontology of the living dead is our spectralization: we become our own ghosts, ourselves apparitions, as our bodies both never were and continue after death.
Meanwhile Colin Dayan’s “Israel Potter; or, The Excrescence” begins with resurrection. “Why should I try to resurrect Melville’s Israel Potter from a certain kind of academic disregard?” Dayan asks. This novel, she explains, is often considered a minor achievement, lacking the complexity, ambiguity, or philosophical depth of Melville’s other writing. But, Dayan argues, Israel Potter is actually Melville’s most radical work, exactly because of its engagement with unthinkable history—or everything concealed in official narratives of the American Revolution. Dayan reads Israel Potter as a tightly composed, precise, intentionally difficult text. In Melville’s “epic of the piecemeal,” she compellingly explains, he takes “anything nonhuman or considered unimportant or vile . . . and makes his text their receptacle.” And Melville does so—returning subjects that were removed from more official narratives—by surrendering his prose to what Dayan describes as excrescence: unruly outcroppings of the inanimate or insensate, which play out their dramas on the narrative surface of Melville’s writing.
Dayan’s argument about “the excrescence” is that in Israel Potter Melville consistently pairs literary devices such as metaphors and similes with the history of extermination. “Rusty muzzles” on John Paul Jones’s ship, for example, are “like a parcel of dirty mulattoes from a cellar-way.” And for Dayan this simile, this pocket of something seemingly extraneous, keeps the history of the Middle Passage alive. It also suggests indiscernibility between this storied ship and the hold of a slaver—between celebrated guns and objectified faces—entangling myths of heroism with the wastes of empire. In working through examples of these excrescences, Dayan shows us that throughout Israel Potter the things that seem superfluous are the things that matter most. And like Israel Potter they are revived with Melville’s language. Ultimately, we find that for Melville and Dayan everything disposable or discarded eventually throbs with animate life. Melville’s entire antitaxonomical, overturned mix of human and nonhuman animals, spirits, and things becomes indistinguishable and utterly materialized in and through the similes that are “the meat of [Melville’s] fiction.”
When the protagonist in Melville’s “The Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids” makes his way to a factory, he is astounded by its great machine. Ivy Wilson begins “Melville, Materiality, and the Social Hieroglyphics of Leisure and Labor” with an account of the way the narrator attempts to comprehend the machine’s inscrutability through acts of translation where he substitutes one image for another. He suggests that the narrator’s experience is a synecdoche for a larger hermeneutical problematic within Melville’s story: during a period when sweeping transformations in the social lives of things made them illegible, perception is repeatedly portrayed as inextricable from interpretation. Here Wilson argues that for Melville these things—like the machine or the paper it produces—function as what Marx describes as “social hieroglyphics.” They illuminate the opacity of things that increasingly necessitate acts of translation. So Wilson situates hieroglyphics not just as denotative marks within a discursive system but as figures that symbolize the partitioning of subjectivity within reimagined systems of social belonging.
As an example Wilson offers the men of Melville’s “Paradise of Bachelors,” who create a gender- and class-stratified constituency of people with similar inclinations. They clearly work to create distance from the base materiality of everyday life specifically by creating a symbolic or metanarrative layer, which the narrator tries to translate for his readers. But here, Wilson explains, objects like the alleged Jericho horn are coded so successfully that the narrator—a rube from America—misrecognizes it, mislabels it, and marks himself as outside its discursive system. Wilson goes on to explain that this narrator also repeatedly attempts to escape the uncanny feeling the laboring women of Melville’s “Tartarus of Maids” provoke by turning from its objects to memories of his time in Paradise, as if he could fix or eliminate the impossible disjunctions between them. So a memory of the bachelors’ manicured lawns is superimposed on his encounter with the maids’ austere factory, as if there were a way to translate between worlds. Wilson views these disjunctions and missed connections as an “inverted similitude,” a hinge that joins the panels of Melville’s diptych together in a way that is still asymmetrical. It enables Melville to offer correlations while refusing to equate them to each other. Ultimately, for Wilson, this hinge does not just call attention to formal questions about the unclear relationships between the two parts of Melville’s diptych. It also shows that Melville’s story should be seen as a cautionary tale about the problems of translation between two social orders.
To conclude we go on a journey with John Modern, whose “Melville’s Basement Tapes” takes us from Moby-Dick to C. L. R. James on Ellis Island and finally to Howard P. Vincent’s basement, where the punk band Devo recorded in the aftermath of shootings at Kent State University. Modern begins with Wai Chee Dimock’s theory of resonance, her focus on the ways a text sounds across time. Then he treats Moby-Dick as a diachronic object, offering a history of engagement with it that focuses on its technological surround. There is a pressing case to be made, Modern tells us, that Moby-Dick offers keys for surviving the catastrophic consequences of mechanical advance.
To situate Moby-Dick’s relationship to technology, Modern begins with a history of the “discovery” of patterns of totalitarianism in Captain Ahab, which moves from the first wave of the Melville revival to Cold War critics’ reading of Ahab as Adolf Hitler. But his parallel focus is on machines. He reminds us that cybernetics also came of age in the aftermath of World War II, increasing exponentially as we approach Modern’s moment of resonance: the 1970s in Akron, Ohio. Here Modern tells the story of “the radial age”: the collapse of Ohio tire companies that didn’t keep up with technological developments amid the rise of systems analysis, prompting unprecedented layoffs—and books like Keith R. London’s The People Side of Systems, a manual designed to help managers ease workers’ worries about the rise of mechanization. For Modern the unwavering belief in approaching the world as a system resonated with Moby-Dick, which was also written during “an eruption of technical progress.” This reading brings us back to Ahab, whose “delirious but still methodical scheme” takes on a new layer of resonance. “To accomplish his object,” writes Ishmael, “Ahab must use tools.”
After laying this groundwork Modern builds to a more “outrageous conceit”: that Devo—and their carefully considered theory of devolution—is part of the reception history of Moby-Dick, even if their more immediate causes were the immanent frames of automation and state violence. In the summer of 1973 they practiced and recorded in Vincent’s basement, which was “a shrine to the mechanical conceits of sperm whale hunting, to the technological prowess used to hunt, capture, kill, and commodify.” That notoriously excessive, overwhelming space was a site where the energies of technological technique were felt and then met with Moby-Dick’s powerful blend of submission and resistance.
Taylor begins with a world of deep time, such that any sign of human or animal life is temporary and borrowed. His chapter prompts important questions: Are we asking too much of materialism? Are we asking too much of life? And have these chapters been too utopian? Taylor’s Melville preemptively imagines an alternative to biopower that is grounded in an “immanent lethality.” But Colin Dayan, Ivy Wilson, and John Modern turn to the worlds produced and imagined in response to Melville’s language—or, as Modern frames it, to his texts’ resonance, the ways they sound now. With Dayan this is even explicit, as she turns from death to resurrection, countering Taylor’s reading with an argument that in Melville’s work some things are seen as dead when, in fact, they are all alive. In many ways this tension between life and death draws out what Richard Grusin, in The Nonhuman Turn, frames as a reminder that the stakes of flat ontology—and specifically, reframing humans as objects—are dramatically different for critics and theorists who “work precisely against the objectification of the human, its transformation into a nonhuman object or thing that can be bought and sold” (xviii). This problem of objectification haunts this collection, along with any work on nonhuman or materialist turns. But here, as in the chapters in Part III, the authors after Taylor turn to materialism for recuperative projects.
The other chapters in Part IV consider the ways that Melville’s writing (and often, specifically, his literary devices) help us think about marginalization, bringing us to questions about which subjects are fully alive and how we can translate between them. Dayan turns to Melville’s excrescences—unruly outcroppings of the supposedly inanimate that play out their dramas on the surfaces of Melville’s text as metaphors or similes that are consistently paired with alleged objects connected to the history of extermination. For Dayan these literary devices ultimately reveal to careful readers that everything is indistinguishable and alive. Wilson’s turn to literary devices does a very different kind of work. His “inverted similitude,” the hinge in Melville’s diptych, is a structural device that ultimately reveals the impossibility of translating between social orders. For Wilson things serve as “social hieroglyphics,” and translation requires subjectivity that has been shaped by relevant social belonging. Dayan thinks about Melville’s formal response to marginalization, exclusion, and dehumanization, but Wilson focuses on Melville’s portrayal of the partitioned subjectivities that make translations across social orders so difficult. Like Wilson, Modern thinks seriously about the ways Moby-Dick helps readers think about factory labor and the effects of the “technological surround” in Melville’s moment and in the decades that follow, raising related questions about influential but incomplete cultural translation. Like Dayan, Modern thinks about the ways Melville can be used not just as a resource in the face of dehumanization but also as a powerful source for something more: “our last, best chance at surviving the catastrophic consequences of our mechanical advance.”
This hope is all grounded not in material representations of humans but in an older form of materiality: the materiality of Melville’s language, specifically as it resonates (Modern) or resurrects (Dayan). Even Taylor—despite a strong attempt to escape this vivifying logic—explains that he draws on Melville’s work to “reanimate” necrovitalism. So Taylor, Dayan, and Modern end the collection with this logic of the power of print, alongside Vincent’s tailoring,40 Dimock’s resonance, and Israel Potter’s literary reworking, which Melville described as “rescued” from an old “tattered copy” and like “a dilapidated old tombstone retouched.”41 Here the powerful question these considerations of repurposing and rescue raise are what it means to think of texts as alive, or as having lives of their own, or, at least, as having afterlives.
Ahab clearly has an afterlife. In fact, his initial reception includes a reading of him as a “disturbed soul arraying itself with every ingenuity of material resources for a conflict at once natural and supernatural in his eye, with the most dangerous extant physical monster of the earth”—a pursuit that is interwoven “with the literal perils of the fishery.”42 This certainly clashes with readings during the first Melville revival that frame him as a tragic hero.43 And it is nothing like the Ahab of the second Melville revival or the Cold War, whose “solipsism” “brings down a world.”44 Of course, this reading differs from Modern’s moment of resonance, or from what Ahab looks like in Akron, in the aftermath of the rise of mechanization, state violence, and concomitant depersonalization: a moment that tragically resonates with our world in 2020. And it has almost no resemblance to my own suggestion, with Mentz and others, that we find a different Ahab in the Anthropocene. This sense that Ahab changes dramatically in different moments is, notably, the sentiment that Castiglia offers in his essay “Cold War Allegories and the Politics of Criticism” at the conclusion of The New Cambridge Companion to Herman Melville. There he suggests that “every generation needs a new ‘Melville’ suited to that generation’s assumptions and needs”—and that a “sense of possibility” might enable us to “discover a Melville for our time.”45
Work on Melville and the material world was a central part of Melville studies in the 1940s and early 1950s, largely thanks to members of the Yale school, Tyrus Hillway and Elizabeth Foster.46 Hillway published “Melville’s Geological Knowledge” (1949), “Melville’s Use of Two Pseudo-Sciences” (1949), and “Melville as a Critic of Science” (1950), and Foster published “Melville and Geology” (1945) and “Another Note on Melville and Geology” (1951). Other critics also turned to materialist topics in work that includes “‘The Bell-Tower,’ Melville and Technology” (1954), “Melville, Thoreau, and ‘The Apple-Tree Table’” (1954), and “The Function of the Cetological Chapters in Moby-Dick” (1956).
As the 1950s progressed these conversations about Melville and the material world yielded to what scholars have come to describe as the “Cold War frame.”47 As most Melville scholars know, Cold War readings focus on Moby-Dick and, specifically, the ways “Ishmael proves his freedom by opposing Ahab’s totalitarian will.” This reading was, Donald E. Pease famously argued, the way Moby-Dick had to be read “in order to maintain cultural power” at a time when the Cold War served as a sort of political unconscious (“Moby-Dick and the Cold War,” 113). A second and to some degree competing reading developed by Newton Arvin and F. O. Matthiessen framed Captain Ahab as the “apotheosis of the American individual.”48 But both versions of Ahab offer a very different character from what readers will find in this volume: they offer an Ahab that is powerful, coherent, and unexpectedly complete.
These readings of Ahab were notably shaped in a moment that also gave rise to the formation of C. P. Snow’s “two cultures.” We saw, that is, what Bruno Latour has come to describe as a “purification” of both the “humanities” and “sciences.”49 Or, to use Snow’s famous language, “western society” was “increasingly being split into two polar groups”: “literary intellectuals” and “physical scientists.”50 This epistemic shift clearly influenced approaches to both Melville and Ahab. In fact, C. L. R. James linked Ahab to Hitler exactly because of their shared obsession with “science,” which James defined as the “instrumental management of things” (James, Mariners, Renegades, and Castaways, 15).
Throughout the course of the 1950s discussions of both science and materialism were systematically removed from Melville studies. This was so dramatic that discussions of Melville’s stunningly strong education in mathematics and science were quite literally written out of biographies about him from 1951 to 1998—even as the length of these books increased from three hundred to two thousand pages (Farmer, “Herman Melville and Joseph Henry at the Albany Academy,” 4–6). It is difficult to account for an absence of work on topics as broad as “science” and “materialism,” but this observation seems meaningful: the same number of articles on Melville’s connection to materialism were published in the forty-year period between 1956 and 1996 as in the ten-year period from 1945 to 1955. And as late as 1990 and 1991 even essays on Melville and biological waste or spontaneous combustion were framed as discussions about “faith” and “divine providence.”51 But the most powerful mark of the transition from work on Melville and the material world to these Cold War readings may be an anecdotal one. In 1950 Hillway, the founder of the Melville Society, abandoned his long-awaited book on Melville and nineteenth-century science to write a play called Captain Ahab.52
The transition to so-called Cold War readings of Moby-Dick actually began before the Cold War with a series of accounts that linked Ahab to fascism. These started as early as 1927, when William Faulkner described Ahab as “a man of forceful character” “bent on his own destruction and dragging his immediate world down with him with a despotic and utter disregard of them as individuals.” John Modern adds that as the 1930s progressed, more-ominous readings of Ahab gained notice in left-leaning publications and periodicals.53 And Henry Murray, who became involved in analyzing the psychodynamics of Nazism for the U.S. government, developed an image of Ahab that evoked Hitler, Francisco Franco, and Benito Mussolini.54 In 1941, F. O. Matthiessen described Ahab as “a fearful symbol of the self-enclosed individualism that, carried to its furthest extreme, brings disaster both upon itself and upon the group of which it is part.”55 In subsequent decades this reading took hold, from Howard Vincent’s 1949 account of the “fiendish dedication of the crew to the will of Ahab” to Clare Spark’s Hunting Captain Ahab: Psychological Warfare and the Melville Revival (2001), which uses Ahab to investigate the “effort to maintain authoritarian social relations in an age of democratic aspirations.”56
Across genres, perspectives, and several decades, a pattern of thinking about Ahab and fascism is clear. It has also notably and importantly made its way into the popular imagination, into conversations beyond the confines of professional literary criticism. When we find Ahab in the wild in the twenty-first century, here are the headlines: In 2013 Charles Blow described Republicans forcing a government shutdown as “the Captain Ahabs of the House.”57 In 2019 Neil Steinberg covered “White Whale and Wide Wall: American Obsessives Ahab and Donald Trump.”58 And in 2011 Nathaniel Philbrick offered an especially stunning, politicized reading in Vanity Fair:
In Melville’s view, it doesn’t take much to become a demagogue as long as you learn a few simple tricks. Dictators such as Hitler, Saddam Hussein, and Muammar Qaddafi are not geniuses; they are paranoid despots and expert manipulators of men. If you want to understand how these and other megalomaniacs pull it off, read the last third of Moby-Dick and watch as Ahab tightens his stranglehold on the Pequod’s crew in his increasingly horrifying quest for the White Whale.59
Here we find a series of related assumptions. Ahab is a political figure. Ahab is a megalomaniac. And Ahab has taken control of the Pequod’s crew, intentionally manipulating them with some level of strategy and expertise.
•••
Ahab Unbound intentionally offers a turn away from these readings—a turn, that is, away from political allegory and back toward materialism. But this is a turn, and not just a return, because our critical goals have changed. In the 1940s Hillway and Foster wanted to understand Melville by recovering his sources. But the thinkers I have framed as part of a materialist turn don’t imagine understanding Melville as the goal of their engagements with discussions of the material world—or representations of material humans. Instead we think with Melville about questions that relate to current political or philosophical matters of concern. The shift is from initial attempts to excavate Melville’s sources to a desire to actually build something with them.60 We turn to an old archive for very different ends. I have argued, at length, that this “new” work on Melville and the material world blends discovery and recovery (Farmer, “Herman Melville and Joseph Henry at the Albany Academy,” 6, 25).
In this collection, we asked authors to offer a very wide range of materialist perspectives that addressed current matters of concern. In response they considered topics like the problems of the relationship between materialist commitments and the desire for political efficacy, the ethics of dismissing the importance of the body, capitalism, labor, race, disease, death, and the Anthropocene. If there was any convergence, it was a collective focus on the question, why do we read Ahab as an allegorical political figure instead of a material body in pain? This is the core claim that emerged as our collection assembled. We also asked, in turn, what it means to consider a body in pain represented in a work of literature: is it about ontology, empathy, etiology, epistemology, criminality, sovereignty, or some combination thereof? As Snediker powerfully formulates, our contributors also ask the questions, What is the relationship between the body and pain? What happens if we move from an essentialist ontology to one grounded in flux—and move, in turn, from a body that has pain to a body in a state of pain or overwhelmedness or hunger? And is it possible for us to stop trying to imagine an “Ahab” separate from his experience of pain and suffering, loss and incompleteness, perpetual fluctuation and awareness that he is not in control? Here we might follow Melville’s lead and consider Ahab’s remarkable porousness instead of listening to his false conceit of agency.61
Of course this leaves one final question: Why Ahab? Here the answer is not that we are Melville scholars, that Moby-Dick is a famous text with a strong built-in audience, or that this novel resonates so clearly with such a wide range of theoretical work that it is often the central text in “Introduction to Theory” courses. Instead we turn to Ahab because he offers such a spectacular example of the Cold War readings that emerged at exactly the moment that formal discussions of Melville and the material world were all but replaced by political readings—and specifically, by a form of political critique that was framed as antithetical to “science.” Knowing this critical history is important for actually understanding a Melville who did not see “science” and “the humanities” as two different fields in 1851. It is crucial for understanding the rise of “critique” and its understandable resistance to science and technology. And finally, it helps us recontextualize the fact that new work on literature and science is arising concomitantly with calls for “new formalism” and work that is “postcritical,” as if these topics and methods had to be paired. Our contributors break that historically contingent bloc. If the first wave of materialist work on Melville challenged the idea of the rational agent and the second resisted anthropocentrism by turning to nonhuman agents or nonhuman scales, this third wave—our collection’s wave—does not comply with the content or the logic of Moby-Dick’s Cold War frame. Instead of turning to an abstract “democracy of things,” Ahab Unbound offers more pointed accounts of the political possibilities of materialist approaches, refusing the separation between the “humanities” and the “sciences”—which didn’t limit critics in the 1940s and which is losing power over us.62
1. R. E. Watters, “Melville’s ‘Isolatoes,’” PMLA 60, no. 4 (December 1945): 1138–48; R. H. Gabriel, The Course of American Democratic Thought (New York: Ronald Press, 1940), 73.
2. Eric Wilson, The Spiritual History of Ice: Romanticism, Science, and the Imagination (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 82.
3. It is important to mention two notable precursors to our argument, or essays that at least move against the grain in this direction. See Jonathan Arac, “‘A Romantic Book’: Moby-Dick and Novel Agency,” boundary 2 17, no. 2 (Summer 1990): 40–59, and the opening to the epilogue of John Modern, Secularism in Antebellum America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), “Captain Ahab and the Question of Agency,” 279.
4. Herman Melville, Moby-Dick; or, The Whale, ed. Harrison Hayford, Hershel Parker, and G. Thomas Tanselle (Evanston: Northwestern University Press; Chicago: Newberry Library, 1988), 165. Additional in-text citations are from this edition.
5. I will offer a detailed account of this critical consensus in this essay’s final section, “Captain Ahab and the Cold War.”
6. I have borrowed the term “contingent figure” from Michael Snediker, Contingent Figure: Chronic Pain and Queer Embodiment (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2021).
7. Samuel Otter, Melville’s Anatomies (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 3, 5.
8. Branka Arsić, Passive Constitutions; or, 7 1/2 Times Bartleby (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007); Hester Blum, The View from the Masthead: Maritime Imagination and Antebellum American Sea Narratives (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008); Sianne Ngai, Ugly Feelings (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2009); Amy Parsons, “‘A Careful Disorderliness’: Transnational Labors in Melville’s Moby-Dick,” ESQ: A Journal of the American Renaissance 58, no. 1 (October 2012): 71–101.
9. Geoffrey Sanborn, “Melville and the Nonhuman World,” in The New Cambridge Companion to Herman Melville, ed. Robert Levine (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013); Timothy Marr, “Melville’s Planetary Compass,” in Levine, The New Cambridge Companion to Herman Melville; Richard King, Ahab’s Rolling Sea: A Natural History of “Moby-Dick” (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2019).
10. Two other projects with work that might be considered part of this third wave were developed alongside this one. Here we would like to point to Michael Jonik, Herman Melville and the Politics of the Inhuman (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2018), and Tom Nurmi, Magnificent Decay: Melville and Ecology (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2020).
11. Here see the chapters by Matthew A. Taylor, Pilar Martínez Benedí and Ralph James Savarese, Jonathan Lamb, Bonnie Honig, Steve Mentz, and John Modern, respectively. And thanks to Jonathan D. S. Schroeder for developing this wonderful set of questions.
12. Mel Y. Chen, Animacies: Biopolitics, Racial Mattering, and Queer Affect (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2012), 3–5.
13. Stacy Alaimo, Bodily Natures: Science, Environment, and the Material Self (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010), 20.
14. Herman Melville, White-Jacket; or, The World in a Man-of-War, ed. Harrison Hayford, Hershel Parker, and G. Thomas Tanselle (Evanston: Northwestern University Press; Chicago: Newberry Library, 1970), 4.
15. Saint Elmo’s fire is a “strange bluish or violet luminescence” that appears during thunderstorms around tall, pointed objects, like the masts of ships. Its name is derived from Saint Elmo, the patron saint of sailors, but it is also described as “candles of the Holy Ghost” or as corpusants (from the Portuguese corpo santo, “holy body”). See David Seargent, Weird Weather: Tales of Astronomical and Atmospheric Anomalies (New York: Springer, 2012), 178–80. Also see Mark D. Noble’s chapter in this collection.
16. See, for example, Dionysius Lardner, Popular Lectures on Science and Art: Delivered in the Principal Cities and Towns of the United States (New York: Greeley, 1849), 118, 361; James Delbourgo, A Most Amazing Scene of Wonders: Electricity and Enlightenment in Early America (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2006), 15; J. O. N. Rutter, Human Electricity: The Means of Its Development, Illustrated by Experiments (London: J. W. Parker and Son, 1854), 37; Charles Vincent Walker, A Manual of Electricity, Magnetism, and Meteorology (London: Longman, 1841), 24–25. Rutter’s account of Stephen Gray’s suspension is especially powerful for thinking about Ahab.
17. C. L. R. James, Mariners, Renegades, and Castaways: The Story of Herman Melville and the World We Live In (Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 2001), 15; William Faulkner, “I Wish I Had Written That,” Chicago Tribune, July 16, 1927.
18. F. O. Matthiessen, American Renaissance: Art and Expression in the Age of Emerson and Whitman (New York: Oxford University Press, 1941), 448, 459.
19. This ambiguous work is often framed as a painting by J. M. W. Turner. See Robert K. Wallace, Melville and Turner: Spheres of Love and Fright (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1992), Arsić, Passive Constitutions, 164; Alison Hokanson, “Turner’s Whaling Pictures,” Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin 73, no. 4 (Spring 2016): 41–44.
20. For the best published history of the American Storm Controversy, see James Rodger Fleming, Meteorology in America, 1800–1870 (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000), xviii, 23, 38. Additional in-text citations are from this edition.
21. Also see Melville, Moby-Dick, 508, 164; William Redfield, On Whirlwind Storms: With Replies to the Objections and Strictures of Dr. Hare (New York: J. S. Redfield, 1842), 26. Additional in-text citations are from this edition.
22. Melville writes, near the conclusion of Moby-Dick’s first chapter, “Now that I recall all the circumstances, I think I can see a little into the springs and motives which . . . induced me to set about performing the part I did, besides cajoling me into the delusion that it was a choice resulting from my own unbiased freewill and discriminating judgment” (7; emphasis added).
23. Also see Donald E. Pease’s remarkable reading, in this volume, of this moment in “The Quarter-Deck.”
24. Robert Hare, Queries and Strictures, Respecting Espy’s Meteorological Report to the Naval Department (Philadelphia: R. W. Barnard and Sons, 1852), 11; Melville, Moby-Dick, 165.
25. Students were aware of and engaged with the Albany Academy’s unprecedented weather data collection project. Meredith Farmer, “Herman Melville and Joseph Henry at the Albany Academy; or, Melville’s Education in Mathematics and Science,” Leviathan 18, no. 2 (June 2016): 4–28. Additional in-text citations are from this edition. The Meteorological Association of Williams College constructed the first private weather observatory in the nation on Mount Greylock. Its fifty-foot tower would have been visible from Melville’s home in the Berkshires. “Meteorological Observations and Researches at Williams College,” Berkshire County Whig, November 25, 1841, 3.
26. Herman Melville, Redburn: His First Voyage, ed. Harrison Hayford, Hershel Parker, and G. Thomas Tanselle (Evanston: Northwestern University Press; Chicago: Newberry Library, 1969), 97.
27. Melville, White-Jacket, 106.
28. Herman Melville, Mardi and a Voyage Thither, ed. Harrison Hayford, Hershel Parker, and G. Thomas Tanselle (Evanston: Northwestern University Press; Chicago: Newberry Library, 1998), 118, 138.
29. Melville, Mardi, 653.
30. I wrestled with this line as much as any other in this introduction. In 1851 Ahab was, as Jonathan Schroeder’s wonderful chapter explains, legally unfit to serve as captain of a whaling ship. But Schroeder and I are both also committed to resisting the discriminatory logics of exactly those sorts of legal categories—and are profoundly concerned by ableist claims that Ahab, suffering from monomania, should not have been allowed to hold this position. In the current moment we have a much wider range of options than expressions that people with mental illnesses are, in some essential way, permanently unfit to lead. It’s also important to note that Melville—who studied with one of the leading scholars in medical jurisprudence, T. R. Beck, at the Albany Academy (Farmer, 5)—doesn’t seem to blame Ahab. Instead this story is framed by what can be read as Ishmael’s uncertainty about how to process what transpired amid impossibly complex questions about responsibility.
31. Thanks to Nathan Wolff for pushing us to acknowledge that “by positing an opposition between a tyrant and a figure who elicits sympathy,” we “threaten to obscure a lesson we twenty-first-century citizens learn with each Trump-dominated news cycle: that fragility and tyranny go hand-in-hand.” Wolff, “Crippled America: Trump, Ahab, and the Materialist Turn,” talk delivered at the American Literature Association Conference, 2018. We do think that far more should be said about the relationship between Ahab’s suffering and what is, absolutely, a problematic relationship to leadership. We also think there is far more to say, specifically, about Ahab and Trump, though here we find it important to note that their forms of fragility—monomania and, arguably, megalomania or narcissism—are not the same.
32. Geoffrey Sanborn, “Introduction: The Nonhuman Turn,” J19: The Journal of Nineteenth-Century Americanists 1, no. 2 (Fall 2013): 389.
33. Amy Elias and Christian Moraru, eds., The Planetary Turn: Relationality and Geoaesthetics in the Twenty-First Century (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2015), viii.
34. Dana Luciano and Mel Y. Chen, “Introduction: Has the Queer Ever Been Human?,” in “Queer Inhumanisms,” special issue, GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 21, nos. 2–3 (June 2015): 200.
35. Christopher Castiglia, “Cold War Allegories and the Politics of Criticism,” in Levine, The New Cambridge Companion to Herman Melville, 230. Here I also draw on Cary Wolfe’s distinction that the posthuman blurs the boundaries between humans and their environments, but posthumanism requires a methodological commitment to respond symmetrically to humans and other systems by attempting to mark and address the blind spots in humans’ cognitive processes. Cary Wolfe, What Is Posthumanism? (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009), 120–25.
36. Richard Grusin, The Nonhuman Turn (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015); Elias and Moraru, The Planetary Turn; Diana Coole and Samantha Frost, eds., New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency, and Politics (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2010); Dana Luciano and Mel Y. Chen, eds., “Queer Inhumanisms,” special issue, GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 21, nos. 2–3 (June 2015); Stacy Alaimo and Susan Hekman, eds., Material Feminisms (Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2008); Melissa Gregg and Gregory J. Seigworth, eds., The Affect Theory Reader (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2010).
37. Initially we planned to produce this comparison of contributors’ approaches by tracing and strengthening a series of “critical currents” that course through this collection’s chapters. These currents—affect, animality, automaticity, cognition, disability, environmental humanities, medical humanities, and race—also show that new connections become possible when concepts that are often imagined as being in the allegedly separate realms science and the humanities are made to work together. Collectively these currents challenge the idea of distinct humans or persons. They offer readings of embodied affects, feelings, and even physiological processes. And they do so in ways that challenge hierarchical organizations of matter, directing us to different sites, scales, and temporalities, which make new alliances possible. Unfortunately it turns out this wasn’t something we had space to do in this short introduction. So instead we will have to settle for sharing the shape of these currents here, with hope that their various contours will be clear to our readers.
38. This idea of “thinking with Melville” is conceptually derived from Isabelle Stengers, Michael Chase, and Bruno Latour, Thinking with Whitehead: A Free and Wild Creation of Concepts (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2011).
39. For a longer version of this critique, see Michael D. Snediker, “Melville and Queerness without Character,” in Levine, The New Cambridge Companion to Herman Melville.
40. Howard Vincent considered Melville’s “patchwork” fictions, or his “borrowing” from “original” sources. See Vincent, The Tailoring of Melville’s “White-Jacket” (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1970).
41. Herman Melville, Israel Potter: His Fifty Years of Exile (Evanston: Northwestern University Press; Chicago: Newberry Library, 1998), vii, 169.
42. Evert A. Duyckinck, “Melville’s Moby-Dick; or, The Whale,” Literary World, November 22, 1851, 403–4.
43. Raymond M. Weaver, Herman Melville: Mariner and Mystic (New York: George H. Doran, 1921), 382, 332.
44. Charles Olson, “Lear and Moby-Dick,” Twice-a-Year 1 (Fall–Winter 1938): 186.
45. Castiglia, “Cold War Allegories and the Politics of Criticism,” 220, 231.
46. For background on Stanley Williams and the multitude of influential early Melville critics trained at Yale, see Stanford Marovitz, “The Melville Revival,” in A Companion to Herman Melville, ed. Wyn Kelley (Malden, Mass.: Wiley-Blackwell, 2015), 523.
47. For more on this Cold War frame, see Donald E. Pease, “Moby-Dick and the Cold War,” in The American Renaissance Reconsidered, ed. Walter Benn Michaels and Donald E. Pease (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985), 113; William V. Spanos, The Errant Art of Moby-Dick: The Canon, the Cold War, and the Struggle for American Studies (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1995); Castiglia, “Cold War Allegories and the Politics of Criticism,” 220.
48. Jennifer Fleissner, “Familiar Forms, Unfamiliar Beings,” J19: The Journal of Nineteenth-Century Americanists 1, no. 2 (Fall 2013): 457–58. Fleissner’s article gives an excellent overview of this criticism.
49. Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993), 10–11.
50. C. P. Snow, “The Two Cultures,” Leonardo 23, nos. 2–3 (1990): 169.
51. Ernest S. Bernard, “Spontaneous Combustion in Redburn: Redburn’s Ultimate Guidebook?,” Studies in the Novel 23, no. 3 (Fall 1991): 349; James Duban and William J. Scheick, “The Commodious ‘Life-Preserver’ in Melville’s The Confidence-Man,” American Literature 62, no. 2 (June 1990): 309.
52. Tyrus Hillway, “Melville and Nineteenth-Century Science” (PhD diss., Yale University, 1944), University Manuscripts, Tyrus Hillway “Herman Melville” Collection (SC 28), Archival Services, James A. Michener Library, University of Northern Colorado, Greeley, Colorado. Thanks to the wonderful people in Archival Services at the University of Northern Colorado who scanned this manuscript for us. For more on this manuscript and its context, see Meredith Farmer, “Report: Melville Society—Bezanson Archive Fellowship 2016,” Leviathan 19, no. 2 (June 2017): 96–101.
53. Modern writes that as early as 1932, Marxist literary critic V. F. Calverton praised Moby-Dick for its “indictment” of “our whole capitalist society” yet faulted it for its failure to provide adequate solutions. Calverton, The Liberation of American Literature (New York: Charles Scribner, 1932), 272–73. In general Modern’s chapter in this book offers a remarkable history of the ways that “within the ranks of Melville scholarship, the patterns of totalitarianism were ‘discovered’ and made visible in the personality and conduct of Captain Ahab.”
54. Clare Spark, Hunting Captain Ahab: Psychological Warfare and the Melville Revival (Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 2001), 9.
55. Matthiessen, American Renaissance, 448, 459.
56. Howard P. Vincent, The Trying-Out of “Moby-Dick” (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1949), 161; Spark, Hunting Captain Ahab, 11, 17, 15.
57. Charles Blow, “The Captain Ahabs of the House,” New York Times, September 27, 2013.
58. Neil Steinberg, “White Whale and Wide Wall: American Obsessives Ahab and Donald Trump,” Chicago Sun-Times, February 17, 2019.
59. Nathaniel Philbrick, “The Road to Melville,” Vanity Fair, November 11, 2011.
60. In referencing the “thinking with Melville” and “matters of concern,” I turn to Stengers and Latour: Stengers, Chase, and Latour, Thinking with Whitehead, 25; Bruno Latour, “Why Has Critique Run Out of Steam? From Matters of Fact to Matters of Concern,” Critical Inquiry 30, no. 2 (January 2004): 233.
61. This idea of Ahab’s false conceit of agency is borrowed from Mark Noble, who, with Branka Arsić, discusses the distance between Ahab’s self-representation and his ontological reality.
62. This point seems especially pressing right now, as we submit this manuscript in October 2020, at a moment when Covid-19 has made it all too clear that political critique from the Left and from the science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) fields can absolutely be aligned.