Michael D. Snediker
This is an essay “about” chronic pain and phenomenology. Unlike many Melvillean explorations of disability studies, it is only incidentally about Ahab’s prosthetic leg. It is about Moby Dick only insofar as the whale’s relation to Ahab figures the impossible ontology of chronic pain. These pages hypothesize the obscure labor of that verb, “figures.”1 Not quite verb of being and not quite transitive, it is a transformative selvedge, stitching itself repeatedly to itself from the outer edges. Chronic pain’s relation to the figurative recalls (however fractiously distorted) the fictively normalized body’s relation to constative language. Whereas the latter’s aspirational clarity opens onto external referents or disappears into the efficiency of its execution, chronic pain’s figurative repertoire efflorescingly presses against the limit of syntax, hovers, and spools: performative, rhetorically saturated, or libidinously dilatory. Chronic pain isn’t merely “like” language—it generates as much as solicits a figurative animacy in the interstice between self and self no less than self and world. The scene of this encounter isn’t entirely mystical; it’s Purell and expired magazines in a pain doctor’s waiting room, examination rooms decorated with promotional pharmaceutical swag, and plastic models of vertebrae. And it’s everywhere one passes or tries to pass as a pain-free person. The transfiguring vicissitudes of somatic duress recall Judith Butler’s sense of a body that is “never fully given [through language] . . . given, when it is given, in parts . . . given and withheld at the same time.”2 Givel, an Old English verb meaning “to heap up,”3 speaks to the cumulative density of Butler’s echoic repetitions. In other words, what is given in those moments when the body isn’t quite given is the very word given—the friable translation of mimetic utterance into writerly incantation. Along these lines, I wish to suggest that the literally quintessential, figurative lavishness of Moby-Dick illuminates an aspect of chronic pain that is phenomenological rather than descriptive; not necessarily how chronic pain looks but how it feels, the difference between Ahab’s iconic ivory leg and the “sharp shooting pains in his bleeding stump”4 to which Peleg attributes Ahab’s singular rancor.
It’s not clear if these “shooting pains” quote Ahab’s own account of the injury suffered in his first encounter with Moby Dick, or if this is how Peleg himself understands the writhing distress of Ahab’s sundered body. Peleg tells Ishmael:
I know Captain Ahab well; I’ve sailed with him as mate years ago; I know what he is—a good man—not a pious, good man, like Bildad, but a swearing good man—something like me—only there’s a good deal more of him. Aye, aye, I know that he was never very jolly; and I know that on the passage home, he was a little out of his mind for a spell; but it was the sharp shooting pains in his bleeding stump that brought that about, as any one might see. I know, too, that ever since he lost his leg last voyage by that accursed whale, he’s been a kind of moody—desperate moody, and savage sometimes; but that will all pass off. (79)
Peleg’s account is meticulous, but with each of the five assertions of what purportedly he “know[s],” the fact of knowledge gives way to an epistemological foundering at the passage’s heart; even the self that claims knowledge of Ahab’s derangement seems to stutter in the movement of “Aye, aye, I,” self-certainty verging on the aiaiai of Greek ululation. Peleg may be approximately correct when it comes to his narration of Ahab’s pain, but his assumption that “any one might see” either Ahab’s pain or its relation to his madness ironically skirts over the extent to which both physical and mental disruption (not to mention the Hawthornian interstice where one sluices into the other) are not available to the eye, whether Ahab’s, Peleg’s, or our own. Peleg’s misprision no less acutely falters when it comes to the matter of the duration of Ahab’s distress, since Ahab surely is “a little out of his mind” for more than “a spell,” just as his “desperate mood[iness]” is precisely that which does not, will not, “pass off.” Thinking about what Peleg has told him, Ishmael, in turn, tells us, “As I walked away, I was full of thoughtfulness; what had been incidentally revealed to me of Captain Ahab, filled me with a certain wild vagueness of painfulness concerning him” (79). Before laying eyes on the Pequod’s captain, Ishmael thus approximately experiences Ahab’s pain as the pain of interpretive opacity, though the gulf between thoughtfulness and “a certain wild vagueness of painfulness” suggests Ishmael’s capacity for the form of thought without guarantee of its content, a cavalet portending the myriad hollows that carve Ahab and sea into a haunting series of negative spaces: “There stand his trees, each with a hollow trunk, as if a hermit and a crucifix were within” (4). What’s more, Ishmael’s translation of Peleg’s terms into his own invites us to ponder the difference between “sharp shooting pains” and a “wild vagueness of painfulness” whose doubled incorporealizing suffixes hollow pain-as-object into adjectival abstraction absent any object besides the bristling obscurity of thought’s wild vagary (a word etymologically related to “wavering” and, by extension, an ocean’s “wave”). While Ishmael’s knack for sympathy suggests an ability to feel what another feels—the alchemy of Peleg’s reportage of Ahab in advance of the latter’s actual appearance anticipating our own cathexis to Ishmael’s narration—it should be noted nonetheless that Peleg’s account (on which Ishmael bases his own) is prosaic if not pedestrianizing: landlubber language, compared to the sea legs of the text’s own hollowing narration, shooting through itself like harpoons, like stars.
The sheer difficulty of knowing much less feeling another person’s experience of pain is sounded on the first page of The Body in Pain. Elaine Scarry writes that “when one hears about another person’s physical pain, the events happening within the interior of that person’s body may seem to have the remote character of some deep subterranean fact, belonging to an invisible geography that, however portentous, has no reality because it has not yet manifested itself on the visible surface of the earth.”5 Not yet manifested on the earth’s visible surface, Scarry’s pain operates less as proto-writing than as anticipation of a textual event that never arrives. After all, while the symptoms and expressions of pain might sometimes rise to a legibility adequate to the limits of our sensorium, manifestation (regardless of our patience or readerly strain) simply isn’t an element of the subterranean fact’s repertoire. Incessantly as it makes itself known to the person who suffers it, it has no truck with the “visible surface” of experience, no matter how many other submerged surfaces of feeling it co-opts or deranges. To this end, the ultimate “fact” of pain doesn’t amount to suffering’s truth (such as that is) so much as its effluvium or dejecta: the wake of a whale or ship, what Emerson describes as fact’s “last issue of spirit.”6 Along these lines, while the text affords Ishmael a glimpse of the “isolated subterraneousness” of Ahab’s cabin, pain lives, cartographically speaking, in the further subterranean of that subterraneous isolation, a fugitive analogue to the “extracts” of Melville’s “sub-sub librarian.” When one suffers chronic pain, one answers to (and sometimes, even, feels ontologized by) what one can neither verify, per se, nor see. And so the sea’s hyperbole, its own endless hollows and depths—the “vast swells of the omnipotent sea; the surging, hollow roar they made . . . the brief suspended agony of the boat, as it would tip for an instant on the knife-like edge of the sharper waves . . . the sudden profound dip into the watery glens and hollows”—conjures the sufferer’s fantasy of seeing of what the agony consists, not least when it comes to the agony not of ships but of the whales that convert the avarice of the nineteenth-century whaling industry into the flailingly impossible quest for something like relief, luridly proleptic literalization of late capitalism’s industry of painkillers (a term originating around 1849 and thus coterminous with Moby-Dick itself): “And now abating in his flurry, the whale once more rolled out into view; surging from side to side; spasmodically dilating and contracting his spout-hole, with sharp, cracking, agonized respirations. At last, gush after gush of clotted red gore, as if it had been the purple lees of red wine, shot into the frighted air; and falling back again, ran dripping down his motionless flanks into the sea” (Melville, 286).
More than the dry-land terseness of Peleg’s “sharp, shooting pains,” it is this roiling language that begins to convey the inner life not of what pain is (corresponding as this does to pain’s “dry staring fact”) but how pain feels.7 The text’s pornography of violence stages an optical frenzy all but reaching past representational art to a horizon of abstract expressionism’s conviction of realism as perceptual intensity freed from the bromide syntax of efficiency and mimetic paraphrase. The “agonized respirations” not only fright the air but freight it with the unfathomable density of otherwise weightless things, breath unto breath starkly contrasting with the whale’s “motionless flanks.” If this passage’s composition turns the flank into a canvas or sheet of paper (the visible surface on which pain doesn’t “manifest” so much as explosively splinter and swerve), Melville’s textual frenzy is blood and paint and ink alike, the lee-like hypostasis of a spasm momentarily loosed from the interior of any given somatic singularity’s regulation: what is pain, after all, if not regulative interruption? Most of the time, though, the sea appears quiet, “however portentous.” Most of the time, if only viewed from outside, the “visible surface” of the sea’s expansive and troubling minimalism suggests a photograph by Richard Misrach.
The phantasmatic churning of depth into visible surface repeatedly breaks the lull of the novel’s erstwhile maintenance of an “oily calmness.” Rescaled, however, to the aggrievement of a body’s trauma at once replayed and progressively endured, such calmness is conceived by Ahab as commensurate with rather than disturbing the madness interlineating his disquiet: “I am madness maddened! That wild madness that’s only calm to comprehend itself! The prophecy was that I should be dismembered; and—Aye! I lost this leg. I now prophecy that I will dismember my dismemberer” (168). “Madness maddened,” dismemberer dismembered: the “wild vagueness” of surface and depth informs Ahab’s performative belief in the interchangeability of subject and object. The temporal theater of the Pequod’s final encounter with Moby Dick mobilizes these various axes within a shifting apparatus of velocity folded into stasis, absorptive stillness churning abruption like a Malevich thrown against a Ryman, white on white:
Suddenly the waters around them slowly swelled in broad circles; then quickly upheaved, as if sideways sliding from a submerged berg of ice, swiftly rising to the surface. A low rumbling sound was heard; a subterraneous hum; and then all held their breaths; as bedraggled with trailing ropes, and harpoons, and lances, a vast form shot lengthwise, but obliquely from the sea. Shrouded in a thin drooping veil of mist, it hovered for a moment in the rainbowed air; and then fell swamping back into the deep. Crushed thirty feet upwards, the waters flashed for an instant like heaps of fountains, then brokenly sank in a shower of flakes, leaving the circling surface creamed like new milk round the marble trunk of the whale. (567)
•••
On January 8, 1852, Melville famously writes to Sophia Hawthorne that “I shall not again send you a bowl of salt water. The next chalice I shall commend, will be a rural bowl of milk.”8 Although critics have traditionally understood this bowl of milk in reference to Pierre, it behooves us to reflect on this bowl, this “next chalice,” in relation to the above scene of upheaval. The hydraulics of the whale’s sublime breach doubles as an attempt to articulate (all while staged as empirical event) the granular alchemy of figuration itself. Note, for instance, how emptied the passage is of human specificity, how thoroughly its litany of verb-forms appear on or as the edges of action, as often reduced to liminal if not reliquary Twombly gestures: like most money shots (if the comparison doesn’t too spoil the cream of the passage’s telos), this one feels unnervingly abstract. The sailors and Ahab are reduced to pronouns, as Dickinson might say, “Soundless as Dots / On a Disc of Snow.”9 However anachronistically, Dickinson abounds in these tactical transformations, unless of course Melville’s ocean abounds in the living wreck of Dickinson’s manuscripts. If the whale’s “vast form [shoots] lengthwise, but obliquely” from the sea, this orthogonal specificity surely informs Dickinson’s “Certain Slant of Light.” One hears echoes of the latter’s “Shadows—hold their breath” in “a subterraneous hum; and then all held their breaths.” When the harpoons and lances finally surface from the text’s concentric swells and hums, they aren’t in the hands of the Pequod’s crew so much as “bedraggled” in the creature’s flank, though Moby Dick proves as much a casualty of the text’s lavish, Dickinsonian kenosis as Ahab and his harpooneers; titular figure reduced to “it,” aesthetic transcendence of whale into “form” at the very moment the tome is razed by its own vast formalism to tesserae and rubble.
On the one hand, the scene’s Trauerspiel devastation is incalculable. On the other hand, however, the scene presents the magic trick that Melville later promises Hawthorne’s wife, prestidigitation of water into milk. The terms of the milk bowl letter illuminate Melville’s conception of Moby-Dick as just such an experiment in the materiality of allegory:
I had some vague idea while writing it, that the whole book was susceptible of an allegoric construction, & also that parts of it were—but the specialty of many of the particular subordinate allegories, were first revealed to me, after reading Mr. Hawthorne’s letter, which, without citing any particular examples, yet intimated the part-&-parcel allegoricalness of the whole.—But, My Dear Lady, I shall not again send you a bowl of salt water. The next chalice I shall commend, will be a rural bowl of milk. (Correspondence, 219)
Water into ice, rumble into hum, fountain into flakes, milk into marble. These unfurlings belong to the part-and-parcel that synecdochically reduces novel to bowl, linked as the latter is to bhel, the bellowing swell with which this penultimate transformation begins. If “allegories are, in the realm of thoughts, what ruins are in the realm of things,” then the pain that churningly circulates throughout the novel is a living ruin.10 As Ishmael says of Lima, its “whiteness keeps her ruins for ever new.”
Like the newly creamed surface of the sea, figuration belongs to neither self nor world. It’s neither metaphorical nor allegorical—occurring instead in the vivid thick of liminal things—but it’s also not simply descriptive. What makes it figurative is its excrescent movement, its strange autonomy. If trying to think about Ahab’s pain leaves Ishmael filled with the “vagueness of painfulness,” the closest we can get to how Ahab feels are these moments of disastrous, figurative calyx (correlative to Melville’s chalice), “a seed in which the allegorical flower of the baroque, still held in check by the power of a genius, lies ready to burst into bloom” (Benjamin, 154). As Melville writes of Ahab’s lunacy, it “subsided not, but deepeningly contracted” (185) as though lifting up its ladder or removing the fingerprints its grip leaves on Ahab’s person. The text’s irruptions mobilize a restless agony we’re being trained not to follow so much as to marvel in, past even its vanishing point; vanished, at least, for us. Such later passages of Moby-Dick spur forms of thinking about phenomenologies of chronic pain from the figuratively vivifying orientation of the person in whom they preside.
In the vanity of chronic pain, that we’re all but unable to imagine an Ahab before the whale presses against the strange experience of not being able to remember a time before one’s pain. In place of remembering, it feels like shuffling through the outside of one’s own image repertoire. Writing “about” chronic pain is always on the verge of becoming a figure for chronic pain: “yet, to any monomaniac man, the veriest trifles capriciously carry meanings” (237). These pages don’t quite answer the questions that “about” implies. Etymologically, “about” is traced to the Old English onbutan, which by the thirteenth century had displaced ymbutan, which had meant “in the neighborhood of.” Originally, however, it meant “on the outside of.”11 To say what a story is about presumes one grasps it from beginning to end, that it can be paraphrased. When it comes to chronic pain, I can neither remember its beginning nor visualize its end, and what happens in between only sometimes dovetails with the interest of these pages. Like a difficult poem, pain resists the question of “about.” If phenomenology describes a relation to an interior, the way the world feels on the inside, then the phenomenality of chronic pain lies further interior to that. Phenomenally speaking, inaccessible interiority is indistinguishable from a radical exterior; it equally falls short of purview. If it broke the surface a little more, it might be less difficult to describe if not what it is then what it’s about. Imagine: we begin with a surface. Parallel or perpendicular to a wall, a window, a whale (Old English walu, “ridge, bank” of earth or stone, later “ridge made on flesh by a lash”)12 is the welt-like interruption of a surface, its opening up, anticipated by the fin. “Even if not the slightest other part of the creature be visible, this isolated fin will, at times, be seen plainly projecting from the surface. When the sea is moderately calm, and slightly marked with spherical ripples, and this gnomon-like fin stands up and casts shadows upon the wrinkled surface, it may well be supposed that the watery circle surrounding it somewhat resembles a dial. . . . On that Ahaz-dial the shadow often goes back” (139). The fin, the syllable it gives to finitude, turns the surface into a clock.
Melville’s writing—Moby-Dick and Pierre, but also “Bartleby” and others—illuminates this scene of phenomenological edge-work. Not where phenomenon meets logos, but where logos, beveled, meets algos (λύπη), the Greek word for pain, the extremity where phenomenology swerves because there’s no way through pain’s impasse. If it doesn’t go without saying, this essay is about chronic pain rather than pain, per se, because it’s only in the iteration of pain, over and over, that it becomes a thing. As Levi Bryant writes, “Qualities inhere in or belong to a substance, but do not make the substance what it is. Substance is therefore that which persists throughout time.”13 At its most general, pain interrupts the temporal quotidian. In the case of chronic pain, however, pain is the quotidian. Along these lines, its chronicity parodies the incessant, naturalizing engine of repetition described in Judith Butler’s account of performativity. The ontologizing iterations of pain only serve to deteriorate the self, as though the interiority that pain installed were its own. It is for itself. This is where a phenomenology of chronic pain opens onto object-oriented ontology, registering the humbling incongruity of this thing that both is and isn’t one’s own flesh. When it comes to the wild being of a body’s unremitting distress, there is no relation that isn’t felt as an agonism of non-relation. Chronic pain no less lays bare the fiction of our ordinary demarcations of realism and anti-realism, dwelling as it does, so it seems, in the unconfirmable proof of their convergence.
Chronic pain might feel most like an object (as opposed to an apparatus, a syndrome, a condition) in the interminability of figuring it out: a series of concentrically maddening or humiliating medical encounters spiraling around this un-interpretable thing—this stone thrown into the lake of the neck. Over time, its imperviousness to these failed interventions renders our relation to it interpretive. At the same time, the imperviousness is felt as an aggravated interface between oneself and one’s self, less one hand resting gently on the other than an impinging. Is one encountering in this impinging a discontinuous object, or some continuous part of oneself, or some quality belonging to one or the other? “In short, differences,” Bryant writes, “are always differences belonging to objects” (170). For Graham Harman, the name for this very predicament is metaphor: “Instead of metaphor giving us a simulated experience of the executant cypress or flame, thereby turning the withdrawn into the visible, what it really does is make the visible seem withdrawn: that is to say, metaphor converts the qualities of objects into objects in their own right.”14 Another word Harman associates with this process is “allure,” that which “invites us into a world that seemed inaccessible, a world in which the object must be even deeper than what we had regarded as its most intimate properties. Whereas black noise unfolds entirely within a single world, allure resembles a whirlpool or black hole sucking us into another” (214). And we are back to Moby-Dick, “floating on the margin of the ensuing scene, and in full sight of it, when the half-spent suction of the sunk ship reached me, I was then, but slowly, drawn towards the closing vortex” (573).
Like many of Melville’s other constitutive sounds and surfaces, the feel of allure’s “invitation” isn’t instantaneous. Allure doesn’t invite us into the inaccessible any more than a whirlpool merely obliterates. It’s a process slow enough to respond, coral-like, to our powers of attention. Melville’s style reproduces this suction-like movement as the membraneous surface through which we read. Melville’s style, that is, is a membraneous surface that we travel through (rather than across, from A to B along a line). Thinking about figuration as an evolving substance interrupts the convention by which description finds itself subordinate to the textual verisimilitude of characters and plot. Figuration’s disruption of textual verisimilitude complicates our sense of certain interventions within the field of disability studies. The disruption, in turn, illuminates where theorists of chronic pain and disability alike might rethink the very interface in which the terms of engagement, however imagined, come to be. For instance, a 2014 essay on Moby-Dick and disability exemplifies the sort of work my engagement with chronic pain is not. Citing foundational first-wave disability scholarship from the past twenty-five years, the essay notes that “Ahab is repeatedly represented as ‘a product of his own physiological condition,’ the victim of a physical injury that seems to situate him outside of the parameters of the ‘traditionally able-bodied profession’ of whaling.”15 None of this is untrue, per se, but the vigor of its paraphrase scrubs the passage clean of what R. P. Blackmur calls Melville’s “excessive sophistication of surfaces.”16 Readings such as this one depend on an assumed equivalence between Melville’s characters and ourselves, as though there were an Ahab in Melville’s text capable of being rehabilitated once extricated from the novel’s effulgent figurative dynamo. But there is no Ahab if there is no dynamo. Readings of Ahab are unable to speak to let alone inhabit the novel’s textual universe to the extent that they assume, in Sontag’s words, that “the most truthful way of regarding illness . . . is one most purified of, most resistant to, metaphoric thinking.”17
It’s in this spirit that Rosemarie Garland-Thomson produces the following stupendous counterfactual:
The plot or the work’s rhetorical potential usually benefits from the disabled figure remaining other to the reader—identifiably human but resolutely different. How could Ahab operate effectively if the reader were allowed to see him as an ordinary fellow instead of as an icon of monomaniacal revenge—if his disability lost its transcendent meaning? . . . Thus the rhetorical function of the highly charged trait fixes relations between disabled figures and their readers. If disabled characters acted, as real people with disability often do, to counter their stigmatized status, the rhetorical potency of the stigma would be mitigated or lost.18
There is no universe in which we are “allowed” to see Ahab as an “ordinary fellow,” because there is no universe in which he is one. Figuration isn’t external to what David Mitchell and Sharon Snyder call “the variable experience of lived embodiment”; in Melville, it is lived embodiment.19 In its movement between phenomenology’s phenomena and logos, figuration feels more palpable than the non-figurative language for which “logos” stands. I imagine phenomenology as an axis rather than the merging of two disparate elements. If phenomena and logos are at opposite sides of a line, the non-figurative appears closer to logos whereas the figurative, as an event (in both time and substance), occurs nearer the phenomenal. Figuration describes writing itself as it inches toward being an event (and more simply, toward being). More important, however, figuration also describes what happens to pain from the movement of its being felt constantly to its being thought about constantly. Character and plot work toward minimizing the force of figuration to the extent that they hypostasize the energy of language in terms of a character’s traits, or a plot’s surprising turn. Melville’s writing is a lesson in relinquishing characterology and the forms of identification it seems to promise, disabusing us of the notion that a character’s resemblance to persons is our only hold in the ethos of learning from each other.
It’s the lure of characterology that cozens critics into wishfully imagining Ahab’s humanness as coextensive with our own.20 To take a different example, Melville’s playful soldering of radical queerness and domesticity impels readers to treat the scene of Ishmael in bed with Queequeg as an image of inclusiveness avant la lettre. What is most interesting about the scene, however, might well be its transposition of queer embodiment onto characters too thinly drawn to sustain it. When Ishmael wakes with Queequeg’s arm thrown over him, “tattooed all over with an interminable Cretan labyrinth of a figure,” it is a crash course in queerness without the guarantee of subjectivity (25). Absent the latter, where does sexuality go? Into what is it dispersed? In the genial absence of both, queerness grows autonomous from the bodies in and on which it ordinarily resides. Intimated by the “labyrinth of a figure,” queerness disencumbered from bodies is queerness transfigured. But it is also queerness interminable. I understand this lesson as both an example of and model for my thinking about chronic pain as something that doesn’t simply reside in the ontological structures it inherits. Rather, chronic pain alters the very shape of the ontological. No less radically, thinking about chronic pain becomes an occasion to rethink thinking ecologically.
However else we imagine its metabolism of materialism and figuration, Moby-Dick enjoins us to understand the fact of Ahab’s injury in material terms: a whaling captain with a leg made from “the polished bone of the sperm whale’s jaw” dedicates his life to killing the whale that took the first one (124). Contra reports that “Ahab” signifies an “all-encompassing, all-responsible individual self” who happens to have lost his leg, Ahab “is for ever Ahab” not despite but because of his loss.21 What’s at stake in insisting that figuration is figuratively versus literally material? Even as there’s no way for me to measure or prove it, I seem to experience Melville’s indefatigable figurative engine as though it were real in ways that exceed how I think about abstraction, or how abstraction feels in the moment of its being thought. Like experience’s non-equivalence to our textual approximations of it, the lapse between the event that figuration is and our account of it feels insufficient, even as it’s untouchable, unseeable as thought. I’ve grown attached to thinking about figuration in these terms because they nearly describe my twenty-year encounter with chronic pain. Early in The Visible and the Invisible, Merleau-Ponty writes that “in terms of its intrinsic meaning and structure . . . the sensible world is ‘older’ than the universe of thought, because the sensible world is visible and relatively continuous, and because the universe of thought . . . has its truth only on condition that it be supported on the canonical structures of the sensible world.”22 Stark as it is, Merleau-Ponty’s distinction suggests that a phenomenology of chronic pain is unimaginable because it’s done in the dark. If figuration so often is imagined as materially distinguishable from the illness or disability Sontag would say it obscures, how in the darkness of feeling chronic pain can one say where the phenomenon of it ends and our thinking of it begins? Like figuration, it occupies an outer edge of materiality that complicates our faith in the substance of its wake. Along similar lines, Nathan Brown invokes Descartes’s experiment with wax and Hume’s account of some never before perceived shade of blue. “Absent Blue Wax,” Brown writes, “delivers the outside of rationalism to the outside of empiricism and lets them mingle in their mutual exteriority.”23
I think about this wake between the outer edges at the outset of the Moby-Dick chapter “Sunset.” “I leave a white and turbid wake,” Melville writes, “pale waters, paler cheeks, where’er I sail. The envious billows sidelong swell to whelm my track; let them; but first I pass” (167). Although these lines are usually attributed to Ahab, at the start of one of his soliloquies, the fervor of its iambs feels less like the outpouring of a character than figuration itself pouring in. Its illusion of voice gradually seems to arise from or at least verge on Ahab’s person. The voice is constituted by the words being spoken or, rather, what approximates speech, whipping itself like the wake of water into stiff peaks, less a voice than a hydraulic between “the diver sun—slow dived from noon” and Ahab’s own soul, “mount[ing] up” as the sun sinks into the sea, “gold brow plumbs the blue” (167). What begins to take the shape of Ahab is the text’s movement from sea to sun to soul to the iron crown of Lombardy, said to contain a nail from the cross on which Jesus was crucified. But our understanding that these words “are” Ahab’s comes slow, as though to illuminate where figuration enters or becomes phenomenology, where it suffers its sea change.
The iron crown of Lombardy marks the site not only where thinking about figuration and chronic pain overlap, but where thought itself grapples with the feel of its materiality:
Is, then, the crown too heavy that I wear? this Iron Crown of Lombardy. Yet is it bright with many a gem; I the wearer, see not its far flashings; but darkly feel that I wear that, that dazzlingly confounds. ’Tis iron—that I know—not gold. ’Tis split, too—that I feel; the jagged edge galls me so, my brain seems to beat against the solid metal. (167)
In terms of the chapter’s opening stage directions, “Ahab sitting alone, and gazing out,” the chapter enacts Ahab gazing out as his loneliness falls in (167). His and our attention are drawn equally to the sensations that the crown generates—its heaviness, the jagged edge where its inner seams abrade our temples, like the point of a compass inscribing the encounter’s very circumference. And yet within the parameters of the scene, there’s no way for Ahab to measure how it feels against the crown itself. That Ahab feels this darkly opens onto the baroque style of its phenomenological inquiry, an intuitive apprehension of the crown’s dark matter. Knowing that one is wearing the crown ought be knowable as the back of one’s hand, and yet in Ahab’s case it cannot be verified. One almost gets the sense that Ahab, “sitting alone, and gazing out,” might be conducting an experiment. That the feeling seems real opens onto the equal possibilities that Ahab wears a crown on his head or that he contemplates one inside it: hence the astonishing supposition of brain beating against solid metal. Echoing this scene, Melville writes in Clarel of “gusts of lonely pain / Beating upon the naked brain.”24 This reworking sharpens our sense of the loneliness of Ahab’s enterprise. The crown renders Ahab a king without a kingdom. If one were superstitious, one might worry wearing the crown would summon some of that earlier crucifixial agony, quickening the pain it was forged in. And on the other side of the crown, as viewed through a periscope, do we readers see those distant far flashings across the long ocean of page upon page.
1. Although my understanding of figuration is idiosyncratic, it is indebted to Erich Auerbach’s foundational account of figura, “a special variant” of which “occurs in Lucretius’ doctrine of the structures that peel off things like membranes and float round in the air.” Auerbach, Scenes from the Drama of European Literature (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), 16–17. See also Gilles Deleuze’s theorization of the visceral animacy of Figures (Deleuze, Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation, trans. Daniel W. Smith [Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005]), and Michael D. Snediker, Contingent Figure: Chronic Pain and Queer Embodiment (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2021).
2. Judith Butler, Senses of the Subject (New York: Fordham University Press, 2015), 20.
3. Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. “givel.”
4. Herman Melville, Moby-Dick; or, The Whale, ed. Harrison Hayford, Hershel Parker, and G. Thomas Tanselle, The Writings of Herman Melville (Evanston: Northwestern University Press; Chicago: Newberry Library, 1988), 79. Further citations in the text, to this edition.
5. Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), 3. Further citations in the text.
6. Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nature (Boston: James Munroe, 1836), 44.
7. Henry James, The Portrait of a Lady (London: Macmillan, 1921), 331.
8. Herman Melville, Correspondence, ed. Lynn Horth, The Writings of Herman Melville (Evanston: Northwestern University Press; Chicago: Newberry Library, 1993), 219. Further citations in the text.
9. Emily Dickinson, The Poems of Emily Dickinson: Reading Edition, ed. R. W. Franklin (Cambridge: Belknap Press, 1999), F 124.
10. Walter Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, trans. John Osborne (London: Verso, 2003), 178. Further citations in the text.
11. Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. “about.”
12. Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. “whale.”
13. Levi R. Bryant, “The Ontic Principle: Outline of an Object-Oriented Ontology,” in The Speculative Turn, ed. Levi Bryant, Nick Srnicek, and Graham Harman (Melbourne: Re.Press, 2009), 271. Further citations in the text.
14. Graham Harman, Guerrilla Metaphysics: Phenomenology and the Carpentry of Things (Peru, Ill.: Open Court/Carus, 2005), 162. Further citation in the text.
15. Harriet Hustis, “‘Universal Mixing’ and Interpenetrating Standing: Disability and Community in Melville’s Moby-Dick,” Nineteenth-Century Literature 69, no. 1 (June 2014): 27.
16. R. P. Blackmur, Language as Gesture: Essays in Poetry (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1954), 285.
17. Susan Sontag, “Illness as Metaphor” and “AIDS and Its Metaphors” (New York: Picador/Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2001), 3.
18. Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, Extraordinary Bodies: Figuring Physical Disability in American Culture and Literature (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), 11–12.
19. Sharon L. Snyder and David T. Mitchell, Cultural Locations of Disability (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 51.
20. See Michael D. Snediker, “Pierre and the Non-Transparencies of Figuration,” English Literary History 77, no. 1 (March 2010): 217–35, as well as Snediker, “Melville and Queerness without Character,” in The New Cambridge Companion to Herman Melville, ed. Robert S. Levine (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 155–68.
21. Wai Chee Dimock, Empire for Liberty: Melville and the Poetics of Individualism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989), 137.
22. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, ed. Claude Lefort, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1968), 12.
23. Nathan Brown, “Absent Blue Wax (Rationalist Empiricism),” Qui Parle: Critical Humanities and the Social Sciences 19, no. 1 (Fall/Winter 2010): 100.
24. Herman Melville, Clarel: A Poem and Pilgrimage in the Holy Land, ed. Harrison Hayford, Alma A. MacDougall, Hershel Parker, and G. Thomas Tanselle, The Writings of Herman Melville (Evanston: Northwestern University Press; Chicago: Newberry Library, 1991), 186.