Pilar Martínez Benedí and Ralph James Savarese
In Chapter 128 of Moby-Dick, Ahab famously refuses Captain Gardiner’s request for help. Gardiner’s son was in a whaleboat that had not returned from a hunt the day before, and he wants the Pequod “to unite with his own [ship] in the search.”1 First invoking the Golden Rule, Gardiner then appeals to Ahab’s own responsibilities (and affections) as a father. “You too have a boy, Captain Ahab,” he says. But Ahab won’t “do it.” “Even now I lose time,” he replies (532).
The scene clearly asks to be read as evidence of two things: Ahab’s monomania—that is, his obsession with killing the great leviathan—and his fundamental lack of empathy. The captain is either unable or unwilling to feel for his counterpart, as though identifying with the latter’s fatherly desperation necessarily entailed abandoning what he elsewhere calls his “iron way” (168). In this chapter we take another look at Ahab’s ostensible hard-heartedness, proposing that he actually suffers from an excess of empathy—or, at least, of one of its component parts.
Recent research views empathy as a “loose collection of partially dissociable . . . systems,” notably, the cognitive and emotional.2 The first can be defined as the ability to translate feelings into abstract propositions about the mental states of others; the second, as the ability to “experience affective reactions to the observed experiences of others” (emphasis added).3 Whereas cognitive empathy is deliberate and conscious, emotional empathy is automatic and unconscious. Importantly, these systems are not always balanced: a person can excel at one form of empathy while struggling with another.
What if we were to stop reading the Rachel episode, and Ahab’s character in general, in terms of a popular, monolithic sense of empathy—he either has it or he doesn’t—and instead focus, as scientists suggest, on empathy’s constitutive elements? When we accuse Ahab of lacking this fundamental human capacity, we seem to be considering its cognitive components only. With his entreaty—“Do to me as you would have me do to you in the like case”—Gardiner indeed urges Ahab to put himself in his shoes through an activity of conscious and purposeful perspective taking (532). And while the captain’s failure at the cognitive level is clear, he also tells Gardiner, “Goodbye, God Bless ye, man, and may I forgive myself,” which hints at a deeper well of feeling, even at intense emotion (532).
Scientists sometimes refer to emotional empathy as “contagion” for its ability to spread, to disrespect self/other distinctions. Importantly, cognitive empathy acts as a dampener on emotional empathy: it regulates contagion by keeping track of who, precisely, is the one in pain (Shamay-Tsoory, 21). Yet what if an individual experiences too much emotional empathy? What if reducing physiological distress to an intellectual proposition cannot prevent that distress from breaching the levees of self? As we shall see, such an individual might seek seclusion from others or instinctively try to become unempathetic. This is precisely our contention with respect to Ahab, and we link his surfeit of emotional empathy and his avoidant behavior to a recently documented condition called mirror-touch synesthesia, in which individuals consciously experience tactile sensations when observing touch to others. The condition has been found in a significant percentage of amputees who, like Ahab, experience phantom limb pain. Significantly, mirror-touch synesthesia is associated with increased emotional but typical cognitive empathy.
What is at stake in this essay is not simply a more generous—and, indeed, empathetic—reading of Ahab, but also an appreciation for how Melville turns to a variety of phantom phenomena, each with a neurological basis, to interrogate the ways in which we come to know the Other.4 Do we know them as something separate from ourselves, or as something quite literally part of ourselves? How might a better understanding of the body–brain complex allow us to better fathom the divided project of human regard? While lower-level perceptual systems (of which there is typically little awareness) conflate and merge, higher-order systems (of which there is all too much awareness) parse and alienate. Ahab experiences a character like Pip as both a racialized cabin boy and a deeply felt manifestation of himself—part of what Melville calls, in Pierre, the “universal subject world,” which has a neurological basis.5 Pip, we will argue, is not so much a prosthesis for Ahab as a ghostly version of that “rosy melting of all into one” (Pierre, 250).
Cognitive empathy (or its lack) drives forward, while emotional empathy (or its excess) moves wildly sideways; each finds formal expression. In this way, the novel itself may be said to acquire mirror-touch synesthesia through some sort of terrible dismasting. Moby-Dick exhibits, on the one hand, the inexorable distinctions of plot (a vengeful man hunts a malicious whale) and, on the other, the mysterious contagion of analogy (that same man is himself part whale, the sea is a library, the masts are cherry trees, and so on). The novel defines and anatomizes exactly as it blurs and blends, confusing all sorts of things. In our reading, Ahab is the aggravated embodiment of this tension—and his stump, rather than the locus of narcissistic compulsion, becomes the materialization of unexpected, because deeply emotional, relationality.
The first of such phantom phenomena appears early in the novel. Chapter 4, “The Counterpane,” narrates Ishmael’s postnuptial-like awakening at the Spouter-Inn, where he finds Queequeg’s arm thrown over him “in the most loving and affectionate manner” (25). Such was the likeness between his companion’s tattooed arm and the patchwork quilt or counterpane under which the couple is sleeping that “it was only by the sense of weight and pressure that [he] could tell that Queequeg was hugging [him]” (25). The episode famously triggers Ishmael’s memories of a “somewhat similar circumstance” from his childhood (25). Being sent to bed supperless, young Ishmael wakes up, after several hours of confinement in a room where nothing was to be seen or heard, to “a supernatural hand [that] seemed placed in [his]” (26).
The distinct auto- and/or homoerotic undertones of both scenes have stimulated psychoanalytical readings, which, by resorting to Ishmael’s unconscious, try to account for the resemblance between circumstances that, on the face of it, seem dissimilar.6 As appealing and persuasive as such readings may be, they risk obscuring what is literally happening in each. In what follows we redirect attention to a different kind of unconscious: namely, perceptual and autonomic processes that remain below consciousness. If we bracket off Ishmael’s troubled psyche, it becomes evident that the similarity between the aforementioned events lies at a precognitive or sensory level: in the tactile sensations—that “sense of weight and pressure”—through which Ishmael perceives both Queequeg’s tattooed arm and the supernatural phantom hand.
Importantly, the similarity between the respective “sensations” lies, by Ishmael’s own admission, in their “strange[ness]”—the phantomlike quality of a distinct proprioceptive sensation of pressure not corroborated by sight (25). Both episodes in fact hinge on the dissociation between touch and sight that marks Ishmael’s temporary inability, as Christopher Looby puts it, to “refer the felt sensation to a cause.”7 In other words, the certainty that ordinarily comes by way of the eye is here strangely suspended, and Melville urges us to pay attention to what neuroscientists call bottom-up processing—in particular, to moments in which the mind, distracted or befuddled or confronted with something entirely new, can’t immediately dominate sensory input with a cognitive overlay.
Inverting the traditional hierarchy of vision and touch—whereby the eye instructs the body about what it is that it is feeling—the counterpane episode grapples with the idea of identity and difference as visible phenomena. The Other, Melville suggests, can be experienced as an unlabeled sensory impression rather than as a clear-cut and noxiously loaded social category. While Ishmael is eventually able to differentiate Queequeg from the counterpane and himself, Melville inordinately elongates that moment of sensory confusion in which the former dwells on what Leslie Katz calls “invisible sensations of nondifference.” Melba Cuddy-Keane, in another context, refers to such confusion as a “positive hiatus of consciousness,” and she contends that it is a crucial prerequisite for changing one’s mind about something—in this case, about “head-peddling” harpooners (Moby-Dick, 20). “The more I pondered over this harpooneer, the more I abominated the thought of sleeping with him,” Ishmael says (16). And yet, he “never slept better in [his] life” (24).8
Ishmael’s sensory confusion in bed with Queequeg foreshadows a variety of “strange” ghostly sensations that shatter the customary correspondence between what is seen and what is felt and that, in so doing, destabilize the boundaries of the self—a destabilization that, we will argue, allows for unaccustomed empathic connections. With its touch-based encounter, “The Counterpane” promotes a form of emotional empathy that feeds on “invisible sensations of nondifference.” In contrast, cognitive empathy offers just the opposite: an all-too-visible abstraction that relies on fixed boundaries between the subject and the object of empathy. It’s like staring at the tattooed cannibal and talking yourself into the project of feeling for him. Throughout his whaling narrative, Melville repeatedly returns to provocative forms of sensory confusion that complicate self/other distinctions. That such confusion manifests itself with particular force precisely in Ahab’s missing leg speaks volumes to Melville’s innovative take on empathy in Moby-Dick.
Ahab’s missing limb is in fact the site of one of the most spectacular phantoms in the novel. In conversation with the carpenter in Chapter 108, the captain explicitly laments that he “still [feels] the smart of [his] crushed leg, though it be now so long dissolved” (471). The episode is considered to be one of the first fictional accounts of phantom limb syndrome, predating its first clinical description by the Philadelphian neurologist Silas Weir Mitchell in 1871.9 In addition to Melville’s prescience, two things are worth noting.
First, the syndrome’s potential to evoke the same sort of dissociation between vision and touch that the counterpane episode elicits: Ahab’s phantom leg likewise insists on the persistence of sensory sensation despite contrary ocular evidence. Second, and crucially, Melville’s use of the strange condition fundamentally differs from contemporary medical discourse, as voiced by Mitchell: Melville is less interested in questioning a narcissistic sense of self than in exploring unexpected relationalities.
Mitchell understood the phenomenon as mere “sensorial delusions” or “hallucinations.”10 Before his clinical description, Mitchell had anonymously published a fictional account of the condition, “The Case of George Dedlow” (1866), in which a medical officer during the Civil War finds himself limbless after gradual mutilations. Shortly after the amputation of his legs, Dedlow complains of “a sharp cramp” and “pain” in both. So intense is the feeling that he cannot believe that he has been dismembered until the medical attendant throws off the covers to reveal his stumps to his eyes. “That will do” is his faint response.11
Melville, as we have begun to see, resists such undisputed supremacy of the eye and obdurately insists on the material substance of the nonvisible. Recall Ahab’s conversation with the carpenter. To the latter’s question as to whether it is true that “a dismasted man never entirely loses the feeling of his old spar,” the captain replies:
It is, man. Look, put thy live leg here in the place where mine was; so, now, here is only one distinct leg to the eye, yet two to the soul. Where thou feelest tingling life; there, exactly there, there to a hair do I. (471)
Dedlow submits to the authority of sight, thereby dissolving the sensory impression into thin air; Ahab, by contrast, insists on the legness of his missing spar: for him feeling prevails.
Yet what distinguishes Mitchell and Melville is not merely a difference in preference for the visible over the tactile. Rather, such differences are actually revelatory of two distinct ways of conceiving of the self and its relations to what lies outside it. After all, the feeling of sensation at the sight of bodily absence may profoundly destabilize the sense of one’s identity. According to the narrow realism of Mitchell, an amputee is visibly, which is to say unequivocally, less. “About one half of the sensitive surface of my skin was gone, and thus much of the relation to the outer world destroyed,” says Dedlow (138). As Justine Murison argues, “Mitchell turns the phantom limb into a metaphor for the incremental (and literal) loss of self.”12 Yet here again Melville goes against the grain of his time, as he favors an unbounded, even inclusive, corporeality. For him, as we shall see, the loss of a leg also suggests a kind of addition: an almost unmanageable enlargement.
Melville’s phantoms show a stubborn tendency to disrespect corporeal barriers by making room for a bottom-up or sensory-based engagement with the world. The sense of relation to the outer world is enhanced, rather than destroyed, through the agency of what Mitchell called “sensory ghosts” (Injuries of Nerves, 348). Recall Ahab’s conversation with the carpenter: Ahab brings in the carpenter’s leg (and not his own “flesh and blood one” [471]) to illustrate the ghostly sensation. Like the embrace of Ishmael and Queequeg beneath the counterpane, Ahab’s phantom limb seems to “jump over fleshly limits,” to use Katz’s words, so as to incorporate the carpenter’s leg into his own body schema (2).
Current theories of phantom limb syndrome account for the phenomenon in terms of the remapping of the sensory cortex after the loss of sensory input. The brain preserves the body schema by recruiting neighboring representational zones that are able to participate fully in the natural feedback loops that give rise to our conscious awareness of body and self, but it does so at the expense of limited, distorted, and often painful sensation, as there are no actual receptors in the missing limb. In this respect, as neuroscientists observe, phantom limb sensation emphasizes intrapersonal connections between different bodily and cortical representational areas.13
In an anticipatory and inventive move, Melville enlists a host of sensory ghosts to reflect rather on interpersonal connections. It’s as if he had intuited the fundamental, which is to say lower-level perceptual, process by which we all unconsciously feel (or jump) our way into others. Neuroscientists call this phenomenon sensorimotor or somatosensory resonance. We come to know “other people’s physical and mental states by remapping their bodily states onto our own sensorimotor system.”14 In short, we simulate to apprehend, and that simulation runs like a movie behind (or beneath) our cognitive back. Put another way: in social life people are always secretly in bed with each other, secretly dozing, as it were, beneath a counterpane. In mirror-touch synesthesia such secret connections become explicit—unbearably so.
Mirror-touch synesthesia constitutes yet another kind of phantomlike phenomenon: in this case it is not so much that the feeling of touch has been divorced from a visible source as that it has been linked to an alien (or illogical) one. Individuals with mirror-touch synesthesia experience tactile sensations when observing touch to others. Such sensations normally correspond to the part of the body being touched, at least in the congenital or developmental variant. However, the condition may also be acquired following amputation, in which case the “synesthetic sensation tends to be evoked on the phantom limb or stump, irrespective of the body part seen.”15 In this extreme case of sensory confusion, the missing limb becomes the overriding locus of the mirrored engagement with others. The social becomes associated with pain and loss, yet at the same time that absence also becomes, for better or worse, the site of a prereflective communion of feeling.
In fact, one characteristic of mirror-touch synesthesia is significantly increased emotional empathy, with typical cognitive empathy. In other words, there is no enhancement or intensification of deliberate perspective taking, just the bewildering deluge of other people’s feelings—that kind of contagion that follows blurred self/other distinctions. This makes sense since emotional empathy, a lower-level system, is “linked more closely to sensorimotor simulation of another’s state,” and this kind of simulation (or mirroring) is particularly present in mirror-touch synesthesia (Banissy, 597). Neuroimaging has in fact documented increased activity in somatosensory regions of the brain when mirror-touch synesthetes observe other humans being touched. Again, this tendency to simulate the bodily sensations of others—sensorimotor resonance—is our default mode of engaging with our social environment, but in mirror-touch synesthesia, that simulated haptic feeling becomes acutely conscious.16 Neuroscientists view the condition as the extreme end point of a typical neural mechanism, a proposed “mirror system for touch” that, according to mounting evidence, “responds to touch applied both to self and to others” (emphasis added) and that normally, but not in mirror-touch synesthesia, remains below conscious awareness.17
Other theories associate the condition with “disturbances in the ability to distinguish the self from others” (Ward and Banissy, 123). Neuroimaging has in fact shown atypical conformations of areas associated with self/other distinctions and representations, bodily perspective taking, and the control of automatic imitation. Accordingly, mirror-touch synesthesia entails a “difficulty with suppressing other people’s feelings,” which leads to a more conspicuous “self-other blurring” (Martin, Cleghorn, and Ward, 215). Think of it as the emotional equivalent of Ishmael’s perceptual confusion when lying in bed with Queequeg.
Because not all amputees experience mirror-touch synesthesia, some researchers suggest that highly empathic individuals and/or those with greater self/other confusion may have a predisposition to the condition after amputation.18 Could this be the case with Ahab? The captain, who has incorporated part of the whale into his body schema, certainly experiences self/other confusion, but he is also, we propose, “highly empathic”—in a reactive, not deliberative, sense. Beneath his apparent aloofness lies a deeply rooted commonality of feeling, which Ahab seems to have absorbed into his own definition of self. “Ye see an old man cut down to the stump; . . . propped up on a lonely foot,” he rebukes Starbuck on the second day of the chase. “’Tis Ahab—his body part; but Ahab’s soul’s a centipede, that moves upon a hundred legs” (561). In Ahab’s fiery speech, bodily lack becomes enlargement; numbness, vivacity. And, if you recall from his interview with the carpenter, his phantom sensation is inextricably and explicitly linked to the sensations of others (to the carpenter’s leg, or to ninety-nine other live legs)—as if merely the sight of “tingling life” could trigger it in his own stump and soul.
Images of inexorable resonance proliferate in the novel. Addressing the whale’s head in “The Sphynx,” Ahab famously comments that “not the smallest atom stirs or lives in matter, but has its cunning duplicate in mind” (312). The remark clearly evokes a mirror mechanism, that double stirring in the mind—or perhaps in the body. Ahab in fact frequently finds (or fails to find) reflections or mirror images in others—in Pip’s “vacant pupils,” in Starbuck’s “human eye,” in Fedallah’s blending shadow or “reflected, fixed eyes” (522, 544, 545)—as if he both sought and avoided secret and unlikely “linked analogies” between human beings (312). Such analogies seem intangible but are, as we shall see, just the opposite—and unbearably so.
To be clear, our intent here is less to diagnose Ahab with mirror-touch synesthesia than to use the condition to insist on more complexity. Reading his monomania through the lens of this condition affords not only a more rounded appreciation of his character but also a greater appreciation of the role of the sensory in the novel. As important, it enables us to understand the persistent conflation or merging, through metaphor and other means, of distinctly unlike entities.
Too much emotional empathy—too much merging—can be a problem. As a recent study shows, individuals with mirror-touch synesthesia often intentionally withdraw from social interaction. “I can find it difficult to untangle my experience from that of others’, and sometimes I feel desperate to do so,” reveals one sufferer. “Sometimes, all I can do is leave the area” (Martin, Cleghorn, and Ward, 220). Calling the condition a “double-edged sword,” the authors of the study note, “It may be related to a more humane outlook (everyone is equal) but the inability to regulate these responses could also be overwhelming or lead to seemingly unempathic behaviour (e.g. avoiding helping others in distress to reduce exposure to that distress)” (217). Ahab shows similarly withdrawn behavior, as he chooses to remain below deck, “invisibly enshrined within his cabin,” until Chapter 28 (101).
To say that he behaves strangely as a ship captain is to note that he both excessively rejects and embraces his role. He is wildly egalitarian yet cruelly despotic. Emotionally, the captain has been breached—he’s “all aleak,” he says (474). He feels the world and its suffering in his leg, and it’s simply too much for him. Cognitively, he continues to command. Cognitively, he looks for an enemy, tries to constitute one. A battle royale between the body’s lower-level perceptual systems, which blur and blend, and the mind’s higher-level thought, which insists on distinctions, leads to catastrophic conflict. Observing his captain’s countenance as he eagerly paces the deck, Ishmael says, “Two different things were warring” in him, and echoes of this conflict abound in the novel (233).
On the morning of the last day of the chase for Moby Dick, we find Ahab soliloquizing in a manner that directly addresses that thought–feeling tension. Speaking about himself in the third person, he says, “Here’s food for thought, had Ahab time to think; but Ahab never thinks; he only feels, feels, feels; that’s tingling enough for mortal man! To think’s audacity.” (563). As Michael Jonik has observed, Ahab’s use of meteorological or thermal imagery to resolve the tension in the following lines implies that knowledge is relational, enmeshed in a net of “material relations and exchanges.”19 Yet the word “tingling” directly evokes the literal “tingling life” that Ahab feels in his stump during his encounter with the carpenter—a tinglingness that reflects a bottom-up or sensory-based engagement with the world. Again, Melville forces us to pay attention to the perceptual level: for Ahab, knowledge is not only relational but also fundamentally inseparable from sensation.
This self-portrait is quite at odds with our habitual idea of Ahab. We are more used to a cognitive Ahab, the man who, despite his “broad madness,” has not lost “one jot of his great natural intellect” (185). Like him, we tend to consider that his brain “was very calm—frozen calm,” a view more in tune with his proverbial monomania, with a “fixed purpose” that, as he earlier puts it, is “laid with iron rails” (563, 168). Even if we as readers think of him as mad, we do not, in fact, question his ability to act: despite his frequent tantrums, Ahab always keeps his cool.
Recall how “icily” he responds to the plea for help coming from the captain of the Rachel with which we opened this essay: “Ahab still stood like an anvil, receiving every shock, but without the least quivering of his own” (531, 532). His response seems indifferent and detached, far from the “tingling” feeling of emotional contagion. Or does it? Ahab’s reply to Gardiner’s desperate (but highly rational) appeal is no doubt heartless. Yet Melville is careful to detail his subsequent reaction: “Hurriedly turning, with averted face, he descended into his cabin” (533). The captain returns to that same “sacred retreat” where he had secluded himself for months at the beginning of the whaling voyage (122).
Could this be an attempt to untangle himself from the experience of others, as the research subject quoted above describes it? Many mirror-touch synesthetes admit to “avoid[ing] crowds” or being “cautiously social” (Martin, Cleghorn, and Ward, 217). Could Ahab’s “iron will” be a strategic withdrawal from too much feeling? If the mere observation of the Other can elicit the feeling of “tingling life,” then the episode subtends a link that is based on “invisible sensations of nondifference”—a sort of contagion indeed.
Yet recall also his reaction to Starbuck’s last entreaty in “The Symphony.” While Ahab resists each of the first mate’s rational arguments against the fiery hunt from “The Quarter-Deck” onward, he seems to temporarily falter in this rare moment of genuine comradeship. In another powerful duplicate, Ahab revels in the image of common suffering and absence: “I see my wife and child in thine eye”—wife and child who are, too, “Starbuck’s” (545). Once again, however, this mirrored engagement seems to bring too much emotion, and Ahab, averting his gaze, withdraws. “No, no; stay on board, on board!—lower not when I do. . . . No, no! Not with the far away home I see in your eyes,” he says (544).
Gardiner and Starbuck—with whom Ahab displays such contradictory but, we contend, deeply empathic behavior—are arguably his equals, or, we might say, they all belong to the same in-group: they are all white, “knights” of whalemanship from Nantucket. Interestingly, recent studies show that sensorimotor resonance is stronger when observing in-group than out-group members. Yet this doesn’t seem to apply to Ahab, who largely disregards categorical distinctions such as race, at least if we consider his enigmatic attachment to Pip, the black cabin boy whom the crew at large considers “an idiot” (414). In their fleeting but intense bond, Ahab is able to overlook—we might even say overfeel—the prevailing prejudice of his time. He says he is “prouder leading [Pip] by [his] black hand, than though [he] grasped an Emperor’s” (522).
The uneven relation—Ahab’s counterpane-like embrace of the black cabin boy—has often been addressed in prosthetic terms. A reminder of Ahab’s incompleteness, Pip is variously seen as a tool or a remedy for Ahab to attain (utterly hopeless) corporeal and psychic wholeness.20 After all, in “The Cabin,” that space otherwise associated with social withdrawal, Pip aspires to become one limb of the centipede: “Ye have not a whole body, Sir; do ye but use poor me for your one lost leg; only tread upon me, Sir; I ask no more, so I remain a part of ye” (534). However, mirror-touch synesthesia allows us to see this interracial connection in terms of communion rather than of completion.
From their first encounter it is clear that the reasons for their sudden attachment aren’t the least bit rational: “Who art thou, boy? . . . Thou touchest my inmost centre, boy; thou art tied to me by cords woven of my heart-strings” (522). To the contrary, their encounter (like Ishmael and Queequeg’s) is a touch-based one. Pip, in fact, desperately clings to the “velvet shark-skin” of Ahab’s hand as a “man-rope” his “weak [soul]” might hold on to (522). And he then suggests that Perth, the blacksmith, “come and rivet these two hands together; the black one with the white,” so as to further secure the connection (522).21 Some chapters later, precisely when he decides to part company with Pip, Ahab justifies his decision with the cryptic adage “Like cures like”—and yet, the “most insignificant of the Pequod’s crew” and the tyrannical captain are in no immediate or logical way alike (534, 411). Ahab seems to be gesturing to those unutterable “linked analogies” that only make sense if we attend to the sensory, to the kind of bottom-up processing that disregards categorical distinctions (312). Rather than to homeopathy, this improbable likeness might refer to “emotional contagion” and to the mirror system for touch that is the neurological basis of sociality. This would explain both the irrational attraction and, crucially, the unexpected and abrupt withdrawal. As in the gam with the Rachel, after the initial infatuation Ahab beseeches Pip to remain in his cabin, “in [his] own screwed chair; another screw to it [Pip] must be” (534). Like the mirror-touch synesthetes in the aforementioned study, the old captain seems now desperate to untangle himself from the visceral bond.
And yet looking at the Ahab–Pip connection through the lens of mirror-touch synesthesia does something even more important for our overarching claim. By allowing us to see their relation less in terms of cognitive than of emotional empathy, the condition invites us to appreciate Ahab’s resistance to the racial prejudice of his time through his individual rather than categorical approach to the Other. In “The Castaway” Pip is abandoned in the middle of the ocean by Stubb, a fact that famously turns him mad: “Poor Pip” is traumatized, he is in psychological pain when he encounters Ahab. According to current neuroscientific research, seeing others experiencing pain is thought to activate sensorimotor resonance mechanisms. Yet “when the painful stimulus is delivered to a person belonging to an outgroup, sensorimotor resonance vanishes” (Fini et al., 2). Not so for Ahab, whose relationship to Pip appears to rely on altered self/other distinctions that allow for indiscriminate bodily extensions, mergers, and incorporations. Put differently: it allows us to imagine a different way of encountering the (racialized) Other.
New work in diversity science precisely stresses the importance of a multisensory engagement with the Other. In a study of racial prejudice, participants were asked to detect near-threshold (i.e., just below awareness) tactile stimuli delivered to their own face while viewing either an in-group or an out-group face receiving a similar stimulus. The researchers found that “individuals’ tactile accuracy when viewing an outgroup face . . . was negatively correlated to their implicit racial bias” (Fini et al., 1). The more bias, the less they were able to discern the stimuli on their own face. When perceived physical similarity was increased through more apparent “interpersonal multisensory stimulation”—that is, conspicuous touch to oneself while observing it to another—tactile accuracy for out-group faces improved significantly. In sum, white research subjects responded with greater fidelity to nonwhite faces if they were encouraged to identify on a multisensory level. Sight alone, as in the Dedlow story, encouraged distinction and division.
As important, after interpersonal multisensory stimulation, subjects were just as accurate in reporting touch to others (even out-group members) as they were in reporting touch to themselves, which suggests a conflation or confusion of self and other. Scientists call this phenomenon the enfacement illusion. The study’s authors speculate that the “gradual incorporation of the other’s facial features into the mental representation of one’s own face, occurring during the synchronous Interpersonal Multisensory Stimulation, might induce the outgroup face to be processed at an individual-, rather than at a categorical-, level” (Fini et al., 7). Here, the difference between engaging with an out-group member in a sensuous, bottom-up (as opposed to an abstract, top-down) manner makes all the difference. In Moby-Dick, we might say, Queequeg ceases to be a “cannibal,” and Pip ceases to be a black cabin boy, through intimate, touch-based encounters.
Mirror-touch synesthetes, another study showed, need simply to observe tactile stimulation being applied to others for the enfacement illusion to take hold. They don’t need actual stimulation themselves; they’re already primed for “invisible sensations of nondifference.”22 Ahab, it seems to us, acts very much like the mirror-touch synesthete: for him, sight becomes automatically haptic, and through him Melville explores a modality of relation in which, to borrow from Samuel Otter, “visual penetration” yields to “contact between individuals.”23 Such contact, as we have seen, dramatically erodes the boundaries of the self and disregards the color of the skin; racial and other social categories collapse, that is, when our primordial sensory engagement with the world (our lower-level perceptual systems) is allowed to prevail. Yet it is far from narcissistic, consisting instead of “an interjection of the other into the self, rather than a projection of the self into others” (Maister, Banissy, and Tsakiris, 807). This understanding completely overturns the conventional view of Ahab’s megalomania, which is perhaps most deceptively captured by his remark before the doubloon:
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. (431)
Rather than imposing himself on the world, Ahab seems to be embracing it, or even merging with it. Mirror-touch synesthesia uncovers that net of sensory resonances through which Melville’s whaling narrative fundamentally rethinks human relations. What would happen to racial prejudice, Melville asks provocatively through Ahab, if we were able to disregard the dictates of the eye in seeing the Other? If we were to immerse ourselves in a counterpane-like sensory confusion—as Ahab does fleetingly with Pip? If the “too heavy” crown that Ahab wears refers to the overwhelming burden of feeling the emotional experiences of Others, then his megalomaniac aloofness functions as the cognitive haven from the bewildering deluge of such uncontrolled feeling (167). Yet even in death, Ahab remains chained to the Other.
The Italian Academy requires a statement about authorial contribution. While the article is a joint venture to which both authors have contributed equally, Martínez Benedí drafted the first two sections and Savarese drafted the last two sections. They then revised the essay together. Martínez Benedí was partially funded by the European Social Fund—PON AIM1849353-2.
1. Herman Melville, Moby-Dick; or, The Whale, ed. Harrison Hayford, Hershel Parker, and G. Thomas Tanselle (Evanston: Northwestern University Press; Chicago: Newberry Library, 1988), 531. In-text citations are to this edition.
2. Robert James Blair, “Responding to the Emotions of Others: Dissociating Forms of Empathy Through the Study of Typical and Psychiatric Populations,” Consciousness and Cognition 14, no. 4 (December 2005): 698–718. Blair also mentions “motor empathy,” which “occurs when the individual mirrors the motor responses of the observed actor” (699).
3. Simone Shamay-Tsoory, “The Neural Bases for Empathy,” Neuroscientist 17, no. 1 (February 2011): 18. Further citations in the text.
4. A phantom phenomenon may have a neurological basis without in any way losing its phantom nature.
5. Herman Melville, Pierre; or, The Ambiguities, ed. Harrison Hayford, Hershel Parker, and G. Tomas Tanselle (Evanston: Northwestern University Press; Chicago: Newberry Library, 1971), 151.
6. For Leslie Fiedler, the episode rekindles Ishmael’s memories of his stepmother, which are fraught with an “old association between sexual satisfaction and punishment,” although the sense of guilt seems now overcome. Fiedler, Love and Death in the American Novel (New York: Criterion, 1960), 534–36, quotation at 535. John Bryant has read the phantom hand as a sign of the adult Ishmael’s humorous vindication of a guiltless sexuality he had discovered in his youth. Bryant, Melville and Repose: The Rhetoric of Humor in the American Renaissance (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 189–91. Christopher Looby maintains a Freudian outlook minus the Oedipal. Seeing in the scene a return of the (sensually) repressed, Looby comes close to our argument, claiming that the “sensory pleasure” that Ishmael’s stepmother deprived him of in his youth returns beneath the Counterpane. Looby, “Strange Sensations: Sex and Aesthetics in ‘The Counterpane,’” in Melville and Aesthetics, ed. Samuel Otter and Geoffrey Sanborn (New York: Palgrave, 2011), 65–68, 79–81.
7. Looby, “Strange Sensations,” 81.
8. Leslie Katz, “Flesh of His Flesh: Amputation in Moby-Dick and S. W. Mitchell’s Medical Papers,” GENDERS 4, no. 1 (Spring 1989): 2; further citations in the text; Melba Cuddy-Keane, “Narration, Navigation, and Non-conscious Thought: Neuroscientific and Literary Approaches to the Thinking Body,” University of Toronto Quarterly 79, no. 2 (April 2010): 690.
9. The phenomenon had been described in the American context at least twice before Moby-Dick. In The Pioneers (1823), James Fenimore Cooper tells of one Milligan, whose amputated leg had been buried in a box “so narrow that it straitened for room [and] he could feel the pain shooting up from the inhumed fragment into the living members.” Cooper, The Pioneers; or, The Sources of the Susquehanna, in The Leatherstoking Tales I (New York: Library of America, 1985), 73. Cooper also refers to men who “could tell when it was about to rain, by the toes of amputated limbs” (73). In “Ethan Brand” (1850), Nathaniel Hawthorne mentions Giles, “[a] fragment of a human being” who lost part of one foot and one hand entirely. Yet, Hawthorne tells us, “Giles steadfastly averred that he felt an invisible thumb and fingers with as vivid a sensation as before the real ones were amputated.” Hawthorne, “Ethan Brand,” in Tales and Sketches (New York: Library of America, 1982), 1058. We are grateful to David Haven Blake for bringing these passages to our attention.
10. S. Weir Mitchell, Injuries of Nerves and Their Consequences (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1872), 348. Further citations in the text.
11. S. Weir Mitchell, “The Case of George Dedlow,” in The Autobiography of a Quack and the Case of George Dedlow (New York: Century, 1900), 128. Further citations in the text.
12. Justine Murison, The Politics of Anxiety in Nineteenth Century American Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 136.
13. V. S. Ramachandran, one of the leading experts in the condition, understands the remapping as the disinhibition of preexisting pathways rather than as the creation of new ones. Amputation, that is, might unmask ordinarily silent connections between representational areas. Ramachandran, The Tell-Tale Brain: A Neuroscientist’s Quest for What Makes Us Human (New York: W. W. Norton, 2011), 28. In this sense, he proposes that the “exotic” phenomenon of the phantom limb “offers one keenly magnified perspective of what routinely happens in the brain as we engage the world around us.” Quoted in Cassandra S. Crawford, Phantom Limb: Amputation, Embodiment, and Prosthetic Technology (New York: New York University Press, 2014), 158.
14. Chiara Fini et al., “Embodying an Outgroup: The Role of Racial Bias and the Effect of Multisensory Processing in Somatosensory Remapping,” Frontiers in Behavioral Neuroscience 7 (November 2013): 1.
15. Michael Banissy, “Synesthesia, Mirror Neurons, and Mirror Touch,” in Oxford Handbook of Synesthesia, ed. Julia Simner and Edward Hubbard (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 594. Further citations in the text.
16. Daria Martin, Elinor Cleghorn, and Jamie Ward, “The Lived Experience of Mirror-Touch Synaesthesia: A Qualitative Investigation of Empathy and Social Life,” Journal of Consciousness Studies 24, nos. 1–2 (2017): 216. Further citations in the text.
17. Jamie Ward and Michael Banissy, “Explaining Mirror-Touch Synaesthesia,” Cognitive Neuroscience 6, nos. 1–2 (May 2015): 119–20. Further citations in the text.
18. Aviva Goller et al., “Mirror-Touch Synaesthesia in the Phantom Limb of Amputees,” Cortex 49, no. 1 (January 2013): 243.
19. Michael Jonik, Herman Melville and the Politics of the Inhuman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 35.
20. See Sharon Cameron, The Corporeal Self: Allegories of the Body in Melville and Hawthorne (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1981), 27. For Christopher Freeburg, who has emphasized the relevance of Ahab and Pip’s “somatic connection,” Pip’s touch signals a temporary escape from Ahab’s ambition of mastery. Freeburg, Melville and the Idea of Blackness: Race and Imperialism in Nineteenth-Century America (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 55. Jonik lists the couple as one of the many “prosthetic pair[s]” in the novel and considers Pip to be “another means for Ahab to draw power from inhuman, impersonal forces.” Jonik, Melville and the Politics of the Inhuman, 37.
21. The “man-rope” that connects Ahab and Pip evokes that other “hempen bond,” the monkey-rope, that weds Ishmael and Queequeg in the business of cutting-in. “So strongly and metaphysically did I conceive of my situation then,” Ishmael says, “that while earnestly watching his motions, I seemed distinctly to perceive that my own individuality was now merged in a joint stock company of two” (289). Ishmael, and by extension Melville, needs the monkey-rope of metaphor to flesh out what is otherwise an invisible process: observing motion (rather than touch, in this case) elicits again a sensation of nondifference—a “Siamese ligature” (289) that, like the geometric design of a patchwork quilt or two different hands welded together, confuses where one body starts and the other ends.
22. Lara Maister, Michael J. Banissy, and Manos Tsakiris, “Mirror-Touch Synaesthesia Changes Representation of Self-Identity,” Neuropsychologia 51, no. 5 (February 2013): 802–8. Further citations in the text.
23. Samuel Otter, Melville’s Anatomies (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 101.