Steve Mentz
They were one man, not thirty. . . . Ahab their one lord and keel.
—Moby-Dick, “The Chase—Second Day”
With the problem of the universe revolving in me, how could I . . . but lightly hold my obligations to uphold all whaleships’ standing orders?
—Moby-Dick, “The Mast-Head”
What would happen if the Pequod’s American voyage steered its course onto the world ocean without anyone at the helm? What if the ship’s glorious plurality—multiracial, visionary, queer, conflicted, polyphonic, playful, and violent—refused the forcing unity of its domineering captain? Instead of binding themselves to the dismasted tyrant’s rage, the ship’s crew would seek only what it would find: currents teeming with life, a blue-watered alien globe, the toothy smiles cetaceans bring back from vasty deeps. Oceanic treasures await those who sail without Ahab. The manifold riches of the “blue humanities,” with their saltwater pressure and vast unfulfilled longings, take hold of the Ahabless ship.1 This Pequod does not know where it is going. So much the better!
A hole appears in Moby-Dick in the wake that Ahab’s monomania plows into the great waters. This experimental chapter aims less to fill that emptiness than to take the measure of the captain’s imagined absence.2 Taking a cue from the double structure of the novel, as famously diagnosed by Charles Olson in Call Me Ishmael (1947), the figures of Ahab and Ishmael can represent two substantially distinct philosophical and literary strategies for characterizing selfhood, material embodiment, and the human relationship with the ocean. These two modes of thinking do not define the voyage so much as metaphorically divide it. Ahab’s trajectory is singular, vitalist, and focused on forging multiple cyborg assemblages into a coherent whole. To Ahab the world ocean makes up one vast hunting ground. His composites unfurl through intersections of the humanities and the sciences. Ahab’s vision catches theoretical echoes in the writings of such modern critics of cyborg identities and of human–nonhuman assemblages as Donna Haraway, Bruno Latour, and Karen Barad. The captain’s cyborgism also takes in much of the dominant critical tradition of reading Moby-Dick after Melville’s twentieth-century revival, even as twenty-first-century critics are expanding Ahab’s identities in new directions.
Olson’s theory that Moby-Dick emerged from a series of sometimes conflicting drafts suggests the possibility of a second, less-well-known Ishmaelite strain in the novel. (Readers of Harrison Hayford’s “Unnecessary Duplicates” will have encountered the idea of Melville’s doubled narratives, but Olson got there decades earlier.)3 Ishmael represents plurality against Ahab’s monomania. Ishmael is lyrical rather than epic, overlapping rather than distinct, variable rather than unified. The contrast between Ahab’s singularity and Ishmael’s plurality sits at the center of their symbolic opposition—though Ahab also contains multitudes and Ishmael sometimes rests in solitary reveries. The bow oarsman seeks oceanic truths but sometimes misses whales. He sleeps on the job. His conceptual position resonates with twenty-first-century ecomaterialist feminist theories that explore porosity and exchange within and beyond human bodies, including the works of Rosi Braidotti, Stacy Alaimo, and Lowell Duckert. I call this trend life-buoy ecomaterialism, remembering that in Melville’s novel, the last and most important life buoy is the coffin of an indigenous man, decorated with unintelligible symbols.
The rival strains of Ahab’s cyborgism and Ishmael’s ecomaterialism intertwine and entangle themselves throughout Melville’s novel. On a narrative level, my project of “sailing without Ahab” remains literally impossible. Ahab represents the dominant principle of direction in Melville’s oceanic epic. He smashes the quadrant and steers by his own will.4 But through an experiment in turning away from the egotistical center, it may be possible to glimpse alternate, antityrannical poetics swirling around Melville’s novel. The contrast between cyborgism and ecomaterialism also articulates an ethical core that opposes the singular to the plural. Ahab’s assemblages forge themselves through manic pressure and control; he creates unity through force. Ishmael, on the other hand, celebrates plural knowledges and ethical acceptances. Taking to his bosom a pagan friend even before embarking on the Pequod, Ishmael weaves together the arcane knowledges of nascent oceanography, literary and artistic history, religious doctrines, and even the undecipherable tattoos on Queequeg’s body. By considering “Ahab” and “Ishmael” as at least theoretically detachable from the conceptual universe of Moby-Dick, this chapter explores both what these figures represent and what options might emerge if the centrality of either one were diminished.
In Olson’s poetic reading, the essential additions to the first draft of Moby-Dick emerged out of Melville’s intellectual encounter with Shakespeare. For Olson, the mature tragic vision of King Lear and Macbeth ballasts Moby-Dick with metaphorical grandeur. Olson’s critical response to Melville starts by isolating the key item lacking in the earliest draft of the novel. “Moby-Dick,” he writes, “was two books written between February, 1850 and August, 1851. The first book did not contain Ahab.”5 Olson argues that Melville’s deepening and expanding the early draft of the sea yarn came about through his encounter with “the ferment, Shakespeare, the cause” (39). Olson discerns the influence of Shakespeare’s high tragic mode on the evolving conceptions of the novel. Thus Olson pronounces that the weakly redemptive figure of Albany in King Lear “is a Starbuck” (49), while the novel’s tormented and supernaturally inflected “Ahab-world” resembles Macbeth even more than it does King Lear (53). Olson’s conception of the completed Moby-Dick remains deeply Ahab-centered because only Ahab presents Shakespeare’s high tragic vision of heroism at odds with universal laws. In suggesting that Ahab represents the novel’s central conceit and philosophical vision, Olson remains bounded by the captain’s cyborgism. At times, Olson appears to have caught a glimmer of Ishmael’s anti-Ahabian musings, and in ways to which I’ll return, his concluding vision of “Pacific Man” (114–19) owes some of its distinctive flavor to the novel’s Ishmaelite strain. But in focusing on the “god” (82) that he sees Melville presenting in the captain, Olson leans into Ahabism. Using Olson as touchstone and point of departure, my chapter aims to surface Ishmael’s plural countermelodies, entwined with and working against Ahabian maximalism. The result will be what Father Mapple calls a “two-stranded lesson” (Moby-Dick, 42) in which both cyborgism and ecomaterialist alternatives become visible.
The chapter comprises three sections and a poetic conclusion. First, “Ahab’s Cyborgism” takes special aim at Melville’s chapter “Ahab” as well as the initial moment of contact with the White Whale on the first day of the chase. These moments construct Ahabism as a fantasy of mechanical hybridity hostile to the holistic mysteries of the deep ocean. The second section, “Ishmaelism and Other Fantasies,” takes its cue from the narrator sleeping away his watch at the masthead, at which moment he seems blissfully free of Ahab’s control. In a literal sense, Ishmael aloft strains as far from his captain as he can place himself; in symbolic terms, he nearly escapes Ahab’s gravity. I juxtapose this philosophical escape with the crisis of corporate identity that befalls the Pequod on the second day of the chase, during which Ahab loses his artificial leg and the cyborg life force for which that leg stands. A third section, “Sailing without Ahab” takes up the last day of the chase and the imaginary pluralities toward which the relationship between Ishmael and Queequeg gestures. A poetic conclusion enlists the shadow partner Bulkington as an incitement to restless and endless voyaging. The cumulative argument suggests that bringing Ishmaelite alternatives in contact with the dominant Ahabian structures of the novel can draw out an oceanic ecopoetics of entanglement and access particularly valuable in our Anthropocene age.
He arrives late, and ominously. It is not until the twenty-eighth chapter that Ishmael describes him on board the Pequod: “Reality outran apprehension: Captain Ahab stood upon his quarter-deck” (123). In delaying the captain’s arrival and in carefully signaling his symbolic possession of the southbound Pequod (“his quarter-deck”), Melville trains our attention on this singular figure. Ahab represents the backbone of the novel, the driving motivation behind the chase, and Melville’s most resonant creation. But in the chapter that introduces the captain in command of his vessel, a complex interface between man, prosthetic, and ship takes center stage:
I was struck with the singular posture he maintained. Upon each side of the Pequod’s quarter deck, and pretty close to the mizzen shrouds, there was an auger hole, bored about half an inch or so, into the plank. His bone leg steadied in that hole; one arm elevated, and holding by a shroud; Captain Ahab stood erect, looking straight out beyond the ship’s ever-pitching prow. There was an infinity of firmest fortitude, a determinate, unsurrenderable willfulness, in the fixed and fearless, forward dedication of that glance. (124)
The adjectival cascade of “firmest . . . determinate . . . fixed and fearless” decorates the captain and focuses his forward-facing vision. His erect posture, however, requires the combined power of not just his own body’s strength but also a tripartite mechanism: the prosthetic leg, the auger hole, and the shroud on which he leans his elevated arm. While erect posture may be humanity’s defining position, especially by contrast with nonhuman beasts (such as legless cetaceans), Ahab’s ability to stand is doubly mediated by technology, both his own prosthetic and the corporate body of the ship. “Shrouds” refer in sailor talk to the standing rigging fixed from the mast to the deck; these lines are often tarred and do not move during a voyage. In Melville’s literary idiom, however, the captain’s supporting shrouds anticipate the “great shroud of the sea” (572) under which the Pequod, its captain, and its crew ultimately sink at the novel’s end. Ahab arrives on the quarterdeck as a cyborg assemblage. Among the plural machines that make up and support his body, he bears the shroud of his own final submerging dive.
Beyond the material plurality of Ahab’s statue-like deportment lies an emotional horror. In contrast to the visible and symbolic structures of his posture, there appears in his silence and lack of human fellowship what Melville describes as “a crucifixion in his face . . . the nameless regal overbearing dignity of some mighty woe” (124). This foreboding accents Ahab’s melodramatic appearance, and while Melville rarely shies away from melodrama, he does hybridize Ahab. When the weather warms as the Pequod sails toward the tropics, even “Ahab did, in the end, a little respond to the playful allurings” of warmth in the wind. Ahab’s emotional life, like his legs, remains half-human and half-mechanical. “More than once,” notes Ishmael from his perch on the forenoon watch, “did he put forth the faint blossom of a look, which, in any other man, would have soon flowered out in a smile” (125). No grins show on the captain’s face, because that face does not express the same human identity as “any other man.” Spring winds blow, but they find only partial harbors in Ahab.
The cyborg identity that Ahab represents calls up theoretical echoes in the work of late twentieth-century critical thinkers who have attempted to unite the sciences and the humanities, such as Donna Haraway and Bruno Latour. Haraway’s celebrated “Cyborg Manifesto,” which she describes as “an ironic political myth faithful to feminism, socialism, and materialism,” may seem an odd match for Melville’s male-dominated sea story.6 But Haraway’s project of blurring “the difference between natural and artificial, mind and body, self-developing and externally designed” (11) enables a reading of Ahab, the peg leg, and the shroud as a triply bodied cyborg composite. Similarly, Latour’s fascination with the agency of nonhuman actors leads him to dispense with the distinction between human and nonhuman: “The human is not a constitutional pole to be opposed to that of the nonhuman.”7 The name of the game for Latour is “morphism,” and his proposed term for the human is “weaver of morphisms” (137). In these terms, Ahab as a composite figure, equally made up of man and bone leg and ship, functions as a not-only-human morphic agent. Both Haraway, who was trained as a biologist, and Latour, whose home discipline is science studies, use scientific figures and terms—such as “the cyborg” or “morphism”—to bring together the discourses of the arts and the sciences. Perhaps the most radical recent extension of the mutual interpenetrations between these discourses appears in the philosophical writings of Karen Barad, herself trained as a theoretical physicist before embarking on an academic career in critical theory. Barad emphasizes “the constructed nature of scientific knowledge” in ways that parallel both Haraway and Latour, but she also moves beyond these earlier thinkers in advancing a theory of “agential realism” in dialogue with the “philosophy-physics” of Niels Bohr.8 These critics of material identity suggest that Ahab’s multiple corporalities represent an attempt to, in Barad’s phrase, “meet the universe halfway”—though Ahab perhaps would hubristically wish to exceed the universe. The captain performs cyborg-as-only-partly-conscious-tyrant, gathering into himself objects external to himself in order to increase his own power and range.
The connection between body-as-unity and external objects that the body attempts to incorporate resurfaces near the novel’s end when Ahab claims the doubloon at the start of the chase. The gold coin, the symbol of the quest for Moby Dick that Ahab himself had nailed to the mast, returns to the captain in the end. “The doubloon is mine,” Ahab cries, gainsaying Tashtego, who also raised the White Whale. “Fate reserved the doubloon for me. I only” (547). The racist implications of having the white Nantucket captain overrule the indigenous Gay Head harpooner seem clear. In reincorporating the doubloon at the start of the three-day chase, Ahab reinforces his cyborg authority by excluding the indigenous perspective. Ahab pronounces himself the central mystery and truth in his cosmos:
The firm tower, that is Ahab; the volcano, that is Ahab; the courageous, the undaunted, and victorious fowl, that, too, is Ahab; all are Ahab; and this round gold is but the image of the rounder globe, which, like a magician’s glass, to each and every man in turn but mirrors back his own mysterious self. (431)
The captain contains within himself all agencies: man, peg leg, shroud, and also doubloon. Melville’s emphasis on the nonhuman matter that Ahab incorporates into himself contrasts sharply with the divine and living appearance of the White Whale:
A gentle joyousness—a mighty mildness of repose in swiftness, invested the gliding whale. . . . On each soft side—coincident with that parted swell, that but once leaving him, then flowed so wide away—on each bright side, the whale shed off enticings. (548)
Moby Dick’s mild nature inverts Ahab’s violence, but even more precisely the whale’s plural unities together with the single parting of the ocean’s swell overwrite Ahab’s assembled parts. The whale appears at last as the “white bull Jupiter” (548) and “the grand god” (548). The description of Ahab with his whaleboat caught in Moby Dick’s jaws brings the biotic whale and cyborg boat–human assemblage into direct opposition: “The long, narrow, scrolled lower jaw curled high up into the open air, and one of the teeth caught in a row-lock” (549–50). Ahab grasps the whale’s massive jaw with his “naked hands” (550) but ends up rescued in Stubb’s boat “like one trodden under foot of herds of elephants” (551). In the conflict between divine body and cyborg assemblage, the human–machine composite proves the weaker.
Treating Melville’s novel as the epic of Ahab remains standard practice among critics and in classrooms. Olson, despite his interest in the novel’s dual form, reads Ishmael as “a chorus through whom Ahab’s tragedy is seen” (57). In evocative but brief comments on the novel’s narrator, however, Olson observes that Ishmael perceives things invisible to the captain. “[Ishmael] alone hears Father Mapple’s sermon out. He alone saw Bulkington . . . [he alone] learned the secrets of Ahab’s blasphemies from the prophet of the fog, Elijah” (58). Turning critical attention from Ahab’s dictatorial control to Ishmael’s wandering philosophy splinters cyborgism into plural and posthuman seas. Ishmael occupies the center of attention by himself only at the end of the chase, when he floats peacefully on the coffin–life buoy provided by Queequeg as the Pequod descends into the maelstrom. In Ishmael’s intermittent vision, however, the novel’s conception of humanity’s relation to oceanic nature becomes less conflict obsessed and more speculative. Selfhood becomes distributed and plural. Across the posthuman divide lies Ishmael’s dreamy pantheism and indifference to the chase.
Ishmael rejects Ahab’s drive for sovereignty, and it is through the bow oarsman’s refusal that Melville’s oceanic connections to posthuman ecofeminism seem most clear. Stacy Alaimo’s recent volume, Exposed (2016), emphasizes that dethroning the supreme individual’s heroic conflict with nature epitomizes her ecomaterialist approach. “I would like to recast,” she writes, “loss of sovereignty . . . as an invitation to intersubjectivity or trans-subjectivity and even . . . to a posthumanist sense of the self as opening out unto the larger material world and being penetrated by all sorts of substances and material agencies.”9 Writing in the tradition of Rosi Braidotti’s “life beyond the self,” Alaimo leverages the ecofeminist materialist position to emphasize the mutual porosity of human bodies, nonhuman entities, and other materials.10 Like Ishmael, and also like other scholars in the emerging ecodiscourse of the blue humanities, Alaimo finds inspiration in the complex materiality of the ocean.11 The great salt sea presses on human minds and bodies, showing their borders to be less than solid or fixed. Melville’s combination of obsessive maritime particularity and Ishmael’s theorizing tendencies both recall elements of blue humanities scholarship about human bodies and the ocean. Elspeth Probyn’s exploration of the “cultural politics of more-than-human marine entanglement” takes her into critical and ecological theory and also into the material abundance of the Sydney Fish Market.12 In a more literary context, Lowell Duckert finds that engaging with water generates “epistemological uncertainty and endless interlocutions.”13 Ishmael’s hydrofascination, announced in the opening chapter, “Loomings,” via the claim that “meditation and water are wedded for ever” (4), finds intellectual kinship in these speculative oceanic ecotheorists. In ocean-loving Ishmael, Melville produces a literary precursor for the recent turn toward the sea in the blue ecohumanities.
Ishmael’s diffuse presence permeates Moby-Dick, and a full survey of the way his anti-Ahabian rhetoric suffuses and shapes the novel would require more space than is available here. The apex symbol of Ishmael’s anti-Ahabian nature comes in Chapter 35, “The Mast-Head.” Ishmael ascends to the highest point on the Pequod, and in that airy reverie he escapes his captain’s rhythm and even the confines of his schoolmaster’s grammar: “In the serene weather of the tropics it is exceedingly pleasant—the mast-head, nay, to a dreamy meditative man it is delightful. . . . Everything resolves you into languor” (156).14 The ascent into “languor” represents a brief respite from narrative itself. Nothing happens while Ishmael keeps watch. While aloft, Ismael philosophizes but does not labor. He values the “sublime uneventfulness” (156) that raising a whale would shatter. “Ye ship-owners of Nantucket!” he warns, “beware of enlisting in your vigilant fisheries any lad with lean brow and hollow eye, given to unreasonable meditativeness” (158). Ishmael perceives nothing from the masthead: no whales, no cries, no forward movement in the epic of the White Whale. Ishmael’s ascent makes visible an antinarrative thread in the novel that entwines itself around and arguably delays Ahab’s mad forward thrusting. In considering the full sweep of Moby-Dick’s 135 chapters, the division between clearly narrative and action-based episodes (e.g., “The Chase,” “Stubb Kills a Whale,” “The Doubloon”) and more reflective or pedagogical episodes (e.g., “The Whiteness of the Whale,” “The Sperm Whale’s Head,” “Cetology”) appears hard to parse, though it seems likely that the division is not far from even.15 Ishmael asleep at the masthead fixes un-narrating at its literal top, though in the slow roll of ship on the sea Melville finds the lurking possibility of a brief and violent interruption:
But while this sleep, this dream, is on ye, move your foot or hand an inch, slip your hold at all, and your identity comes back in horror. Over Descartian vortices you hover. And perhaps, at mid-day, in the fairest weather, with one half-throttled shriek you drop through that transparent air into the summer sea, no more to rise for ever. (159)
From nonnarrative dreaming into sudden deadly drama, the philosopher at least hypothetically falls. The posthumanist philosophies of Alaimo and Duckert might characterize the fall into the sea in terms of entanglement and transcorporality, but that leaves our narrator’s voice no less silenced.
In midreverie Ishmael appears as free from Ahab’s command as he ever can be, but the forward press of the novel’s plot subjects him repeatedly to his captain’s will. On the second day of the chase, Ishmael’s subjection shows itself as he describes the whaleboats striking out for Moby Dick through a sustained metaphor of incorporation: “They were one man, not thirty” (557). In this instant, all the whalemen, including Ishmael, become ship cyborgs like their captain: “For as the one ship that held them all . . . [contained] one concrete hull, which shot on its way, both balanced and directed by the long central keel, even so . . . all varieties were welded into oneness, and were all directed to that fatal goal which Ahab their lord and keel did point to” (557). The men are doubly constructed as cyborgs, in that they have become analogous to the structure of the Pequod and that they follow Ahab as both divine “lord” and mechanical “keel.” Fully melded into an identity composed of their captain’s will and the tools of their violent trade, the whalemen seek Moby Dick, find him, and in the ensuing melee lose both Ahab’s artificial leg and Starbuck’s good will. The symbolic focus of the second day, like that of the chase in all three of its chapters, submerges Ishmael’s plurality. The narrator’s name does not appear in any of these three chapters. The lust of the hunt displaces the meditative freedom glimpsed from the masthead.
When Ahab’s leg breaks on the second day, his cyborg assemblage fractures and he briefly becomes dependent. Starbuck, who wishes that “old Ahab had leaned oftener than he has” (560), might be proposing a human and collective identity, opposed to Ahab’s monolithic structure of human and mechanical solitary command. Starbuck occupies a human middle space, not the cyborg realm of his captain but also not the fully anti-Ahabian selflessness of Ishmael. Seminarrative chapters such as “A Squeeze of the Hand,” which work with sperm oil but do not drive the crew into a violent frenzy, may also display anti-Ahabian collective possibilities that are distinct from Ishmael’s forays into selfless solitude. In rejecting Starbuck’s plea—“In Jesus’ name no more of this” (561)—Ahab deifies himself as cyborg composite: “Ahab is for ever Ahab, man. This whole act’s immutably decreed. ’Twas rehearsed by thee and me a billion years before this ocean rolled” (561). Celebrating himself as “the Fates’ lieutenant” (561), Ahab rejects Starbuck’s religious understanding of community and also Ishmael’s anti-individualist undersong. The carpenter fashions the captain’s new leg from “the broken keel of Ahab’s wrecked craft” (562), indicating both that the new cyborg will continue to function as keel and backbone of his crew and also that the fantasy of unity he represents has itself been broken.
If not Ahab, then who? Ishmael and Ahab exchange no direct words in the novel, though Ishmael names himself as a member of that crew: “I, Ishmael, was one of that crew” (179) who at the quarterdeck swore on the doubloon to hunt Moby Dick. Alternative communities abound in the novel, including Fedallah and his Parsee oarsmen, the distinct groups of mates and harpooners, and the particular visionary case of Pip. But the closest alternative pole to Ahab must be Queequeg, the indigenous South Seas harpooner, Ishmael’s bosom friend and shipmate. If Ishmael represents a metaphysical loss of self and communion with the vast sea, and Ahab a hypertrophied ego and rage against nonhuman beasts, Queequeg suggests the possibility of perfected and polytheistic humanity. As “George Washington cannibalistically developed” (50), he combines a physical ideal with an expansive moral reach. “I’ll try a pagan friend,” muses Ishmael, “since Christian kindness has proved but hollow” (51). Queequeg’s friendship amounts to an idealized homoerotic marriage of emotional community, “a cosy, loving pair” (52) as Ishmael calls the two of them on their second night together at the Spouter-Inn. The queer multiracial union miniaturizes and idealizes the polyglot Pequod—though Ishmael and Queequeg appear in the novel prior to, and to some extent independently of, Ahab’s doomed quest. The Ishmael and Queequeg love story forms its own anti-Ahabian counterplot, in some ways more potent than Ishmael’s musings in moments of solitude.
Following Olson’s split image of the composition of Moby-Dick, it is possible to imagine an alternative book focused on Queequeg, which might have followed the Polynesian template that produced Melville’s previous commercial successes in Typee and Omoo. The intrusion of Ahab’s darker, and in Olson’s reading Shakespearean, tone would have displaced the presumptive South Seas idyll. But unlike some traces of a proto-Moby-Dick that appear early in the novel and then vanish, Queequeg keeps his central place in the tragic story. His made-to-order coffin, from which bed he unexpectedly recovers his own life, becomes Ishmael’s life buoy.
Another composite image of the couple appears when Queequeg fixes the blubber hook onto the whale’s back while its other end is wrapped around the waist of Ishmael, who is onboard the ship, in “The Monkey-Rope.” Roped together, the pair reprises the language of duality from their prevoyage nights at the inn. We “were wedded,” says Ishmael, by means of an “elongated Siamese ligature” (320). In language that recalls his loss of self in the reverie on the masthead, Ishmael philosophizes that “my own individuality was now merged in a joint stock company of two” (320). This passage emphasizes that for Ishmael egotism of the Ahabian variety represents death, but selflessness in various form gives life. (Here it may be noteworthy that the monkey rope is entirely Melville’s fiction, not a historical practice of Nantucket whalemen.) Ishmael sees in the vision of Queequeg on the whale’s back, surrounded by the dangerous spades of his fellow harpooners, a pretty allegory:
That unsounded ocean you gasp in, is Life; those sharks, your foes; those spades, your friends; and what between sharks and spades you are in a sad pickle and peril, poor lad. (321)
Wanting to interpret the labor of whaling as symbolic code for nineteenth-century American life was an occupational hazard for Melville—as, perhaps, reading whaling as a representation of the environmental destruction that follows extractive oil-seeking industries is for twenty-first-century Melvillian ecocritics.16 What seems striking about the image of the monkey rope is the dualist middle alternative it poses between Ahab’s singularity and Ishmael’s dissolution. Ishmael becomes finally singular at the novel’s end, since Queequeg goes down with the Pequod—but earlier in the novel the savage harpooner represents the tantalizing possibility of sailing without Ahab and yet not alone.
Even with Queequeg as a possible middle option, the trajectory of Moby-Dick forces the binary choice between Ahab and Ishmael. Most readers, and most critics, very much including Olson, have cast their lots with the captain. Oscillating between masthead pantheism and monkey-rope fatalism, Ishmael articulates an in-between position that echoes the boundary-crossing arguments advanced by contemporary ecomaterialist critics from Alaimo to Duckert. In one recent essay, Alaimo reads the dissolving shells of sea creatures as an analogy for radical and painful openness to ecological change: “This is a call for scale shifting that is intrepidly—even psychedelically—empathetic, rather than safely ensconced. Contemplating your shell on acid dissolves individualist, consumerist subjectivity” (168). In Alaimo’s reading, the dissolving shell resembles the drowsy Ishmael aloft. Duckert, in a comparable vein but with a slightly different material focus, asks that readers imagine themselves into sympathy with glaciers, swamps, and other unfriendly forms of water, “not to make clear the muddy waters of reality, but to delve deeper into their turbulent flows” (42). Sailing without Ahab but with Ishmael entertains these extreme and uncomfortable ecological entanglements. No direction but outward, into alien vastness: like a sleeping lookout precariously balanced in the rigging, the Ahabless sailor lacks purpose, drive, even motion. Some contemporary ecotheorists wager that this unstructured experience of the nonhuman can lead to a deeper and perhaps more real connection to the world beyond ourselves.
“Wonderfullest things are ever the unmentionable,” says Ishmael introducing the “six-inch chapter” that is the “stoneless grave of Bulkington” (106). The mostly offstage mariner previously described as the novel’s “sleeping-partner” (16) provides one final alternative guide into the “wonder-world” (7) of the Pequod’s voyage. Bulkington looks the hero’s part: “full six feet in height, with noble shoulders, and a chest like a coffer-dam” (16). A southerner who appeared to Ishmael like “one of those tall mountaineers from the Alleghanian Ridge in Virginia” (16), Bulkington appears at first to represent a regional alternative to the northeastern fallen Dutch aristocracy that roughly defines Ishmael’s (and Melville’s) cultural roots. If so, the narrator’s relationship to the sailor he calls “my comrade” (16) may represent an American alliance that might span the growing North–South divide of the 1840s. Bulkington’s vision, like Ishmael’s, and perhaps also like Queequeg’s, the only other shipmate termed “comrade,” is oceanic rather than terrestrial: “In landlessness alone resides the highest truth, shoreless indefinite as God” (107). In Bulkington’s barest contact with land—a few nights ashore after a four-year voyage before launching again with the Pequod—Melville constructs an organizing principle based on nonhuman sea rather than familiar land.
For Olson, Bulkington’s heroic shape represents “right reason” (Olson, 57), which stares directly into tragedy with open eyes. In this reading, “he is the crew’s heart, the sign of their paternity, the human thing” (57). By contrast, Ishmael stands somewhat apart from the hero and the “apotheosis” (57) that Olson sees in the Pequod’s loss. Olson draws the term “apotheosis” directly from Melville’s last word of Bulkington’s chapter, but, interestingly, he does not quote the passage in full. “Take heart, take heart, O Bulkington!” rhapsodizes Ishmael, “Bear thee grimly, demigod! Up from the spray of thy ocean-perishing—straight up, leaps thy apotheosis!” (Melville, 107). This passage assimilates human hero into godlike whale, whose breaching “into the pure element of air” on the second day of the chase “is his act of defiance” (558). Unlike Ishmael, Olson seems not to connect Bulkington’s “landlessness” directly to Moby Dick. Melville implies that both whale and silent sailor entirely reject landed life. If sailing with Queequeg might conceivably represent a cozy coffin-boat built for two, taking advantage of the secret knowledge of indigenous Pacific islanders, sailing with Bulkington rejects all comforts: his ship “must fly all hospitality, one touch of land, though it but graze the keel, would make her shudder through and through” (Olson, 97). Both of Ishmael’s comrades represent turns away from Ahabian monomania, but Bulkington steers more directly into inhuman death and depths.
While Ishmael occupies the squishy center of an anti-Ahabian reading of Moby-Dick, Bulkington defines a pure oceanic radicalism. As a sailor he transforms his American heroic visage into something that resembles a marine creature. Queequeg, who hails from the imaginary island of Kokovoko, presents a queer multiracial utopian fantasy that saves Ishmael’s life via the coffin–life buoy. It may also be possible to read Ishmael less optimistically as a kind of colonizer, using Queequeg’s coffin to save his own life after the indigenous hero has drowned. (This reading recalls James Fenimore Cooper’s paradigm, in which the dying indigenous sage passes his wisdom down to a worthy white man.) But whether lovers or colonial partners, Ishmael and Queequeg at least hint at a humanized version of whaling. Bulkington, by contrast, captures the tragic impossibility of expanding human experience into the fullness of oceanic space.
Trying to come to grips with these fantasies within the world of Moby-Dick has recently led me to voyage beyond traditional literary criticism into ecopoetry. One of the first-written poems in my in-process ecopoetic voyage, also titled “Sailing without Ahab,” seeks via Bulkington’s chapter, “The Lee Shore,” a rejection of human society that both echoes and displaces Ahab’s solitude. In Bulkington’s turn away from the noisy Spouter-Inn toward his voyage on the Pequod, I imagine a turn away from human society that returns to the sea in complete ignorance of Ahab’s quest. Bulkington must be included in the “one man not thirty” who row toward the White Whale on the second day, but Melville’s submersion of this enigmatic figure throughout the voyage allows us to imagine him as sailing almost independently, largely free from the tyrant’s command. In my reading, Bulkington chooses “landlessness” because he eschews humanity:
Bulkington’s Out
There’s a pause just at journey’s end—
a still point, landfall, feet touching ground.
Voices and noises surround you.
An unsettling place, footfall.
People looking a certain way.
Shipfall: still floating?
In darkness the dock buzzes possibility.
Why stay?
Being enclosed by people and their “certain” looks in the Spouter-Inn, Bulkington is unsettled. He refuses stillness, even the brief pause through which his walking feet touch solid ground. The ship’s floating landlessness calls him, though the distracting people at this point are in the Spouter-Inn in New Bedford while the Pequod floats off Nantucket. “Why stay?” catechizes the wisdom of anti-Ahabs like Bulkington, Queequeg, and Ishmael. Against singularity the question “Why stay?” poses options. Against stasis it proffers movement. Against certainty it opens into the interrogative. It is neither route finder nor strategy but an openness to change and dissolution. Whatever its names, it remains suspicious of the self.
“Sailing without Ahab” in this plural sense recasts some of the outward-bound visions of “Pacific Man” with which Olson concludes Call Me Ishmael (114–19). The Pacific for Olson is the American “HEART SEA . . . the Plains repeated” (114), but we should recall that when the Pequod first enters Pacific waters, that ocean carries the special mark not of Ahab but Ishmael, who describes “my dear Pacific” (482) with intimate enthusiasm: “This mysterious, divine Pacific zones the world’s whole bulk about; makes all coasts one bay to it; seems the tide-beating heart of earth. Lifted by those eternal swells, you needs must own the seductive god, bowing your head to Pan” (483). Olson may ultimately claim the last American voyage westward into the Pacific Ocean to be the “third and final Odyssey [that] was Ahab’s” (118)—but the novel suggests that this oceanic encounter connects instead to Ishmael’s pantheistic reverie.17
Focusing on Ishmael puts Melville’s maritime epic in touch with twenty-first-century ecotheoretical models that reject traditional values of individuality and coherence. It seems risky to transform the most canonical American novel of the nineteenth century into an anachronistic ecomaterialist model. I would not claim that Melville, or many of Melville’s readers, would want or value an Ahabless novel. But as the twenty-first century tallies up the cost of sailing under the flags of questing heroes and oil-seeking industries, it’s helpful to find in one of our literature’s urtexts an alternative. Ishmaelism may not represent a path, or even a fully coherent direction, but its countersong within Moby-Dick connects to new ways ecotheorists and humanities scholars are describing the human–environment relationship in our warming present. Perhaps the polyglot Pequod, with its multiracial queer crew, can shake off the controlling hand of her one-legged master and sail into plural oceans, whether whales are to be found or not.
1. For my definition of this subfield, see my “Blue Humanities,” in A Posthuman Glossary, ed. Rosi Braidotti and Maria Hlavajova (London: Bloomsbury, 2018), 129–32.
2. For a slightly different ongoing attempt to “fill” Ahab’s imagined emptiness, see my poetic project in progress, which will eventually comprise 135 poems—one for each chapter of Moby-Dick—in which Ahab’s name will not appear. The first installation of this project appeared in Mentz, “Sailing without Ahab: An Eco-Poetic Voyage—Part One,” Glasgow Review of Books, April 11, 2017, https://glasgowreviewofbooks.com/2017/04/11/sailing-without-ahab-an-eco-poetic-voyage/.
3. Harrison Hayford, “Unnecessary Duplicates: A Key to the Writing of Moby-Dick,” in Moby-Dick, by Herman Melville, ed. Hershel Parker and Harrison Hayford (New York: W. W. Norton, 2002), 674–96.
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), 500–502. All further citations from Moby-Dick are given in the text by page number from this edition.
5. Charles Olson, Call Me Ishmael (New York: Grove, 1947), 35. Further citations in the text.
6. Donna Haraway, “The Cyborg Manifesto,” in Manifestly Haraway (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2016), 5; originally published 1984. Further citations in the text.
7. Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, trans. Catherine Porter (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993), 137. Further citations in the text.
8. Karen Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2007), 39, 69.
9. Stacy Alaimo, Exposed: Environmental Politics and Pleasures in Posthuman Times (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2016), 4. Further citations in the text.
10. Rosi Braidotti, The Posthuman (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2013), 13–54.
11. On the oceanic turn in the humanities, see John Gillis, “The Blue Humanities,” Humanities 34, no. 3 (May–June 2013), https://www.neh.gov/humanities/2013/mayjune/feature/the-blue-humanities.
12. Elspeth Probyn, Eating the Ocean (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2016), 48, 159–63.
13. Lowell Duckert, For All Waters: Finding Ourselves in Early Modern Wetscapes (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017), xvi–xvii. Further citations in the text.
14. For my recent creative reappropriation of this chapter, see my “Philosopher at the Masthead,” in Shipwreck Modernity: Ecologies of Globalization, 1550–1719 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017), 129–30.
15. A full accounting would need to determine how to categorize chapters that introduce future actors but do not show them in action yet (e.g., “Knights and Squires”), chapters that describe action away from the Pequod (the stories of the Town-Ho, the Rose-bud, and so on), and others that combine a sliver of action with an excess of philosophy (e.g., “The Mast-Head,” “The Monkey-Rope”). In lieu of such an arbitrary exercise, I posit that the novel self-consciously divides itself between narrative propulsion and speculative reflection. The contrasting entanglement of these two modes echoes the contrast between Ahab and Ishmael.
16. For a foundational ecocritical reading of Melville, see Lawrence Buell, The Environmental Imagination: Thoreau, Nature Writing, and the Formation of American Culture (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1996). See also T. Hugh Crawford, “Networking the (Non) Human: Moby-Dick, Matthew Fontaine Maury, and Bruno Latour,” Configurations 5, no. 1 (Winter 1997): 1–21, and Phillip Armstrong, “‘Leviathan Is a Skein of Networks’: Translations of Nature and Culture in Moby-Dick,” ELH 71, no. 4 (Winter 2004): 1039–63.
17. Olson’s three Odysseys are Homer’s in the Mediterranean, Dante’s in the Atlantic, and Ahab’s in the Pacific (117–19). But Olson also concludes his book by writing that “the three great creations of Melville and Moby-Dick are Ahab, The Pacific, and the White Whale” (119). In my terms, I suggest that what Olson calls “The Pacific” might be more clearly named “Ishmael.”