Christopher Castiglia
Even a blind man can see the role disability plays in Moby-Dick, since the characters constantly point it out. Their focus, like that of most readers alert to disability, is on Ahab, whose lost leg produces the “monomania” that drives the Pequod and its crew to catastrophe. Such readings position Ahab’s dismemberment as causal: no lost leg, no crazy whale chase, no novel. We shouldn’t forget, however, that the story we read is narrated by another character, Ishmael, who is also suffering from a disability, chronic depression. This fact, introduced at the novel’s start, quickly vanishes—or appears to—from the text. But Ishmael remains a complex and ambivalent narrator, attempting to flee a disability he realizes is inescapable. Above all, Ishmael’s ambivalence toward disability produces the style of Moby-Dick, as I’ll argue below. Replete with digressions, false starts, halting plots, and unsteady narrative rhythms, Moby-Dick becomes, in its narrator’s telling, a significant example of what Tobin Siebers and others have called an aesthetics of disability, one that keeps disability ubiquitous in the novel, even when the narrator is not addressing it directly. Focusing on Ishmael’s disability rather than Ahab’s, then, allows us to see the prose of Moby-Dick as a kind of narrative prosthesis, even as (or because) we reevaluate, through the lens of disability, the Pequod and its captain. That reevaluation is at the core of my identifications with the lonely, yearning, destructive, hopeful, disappointed captain, an identification that led me to a distinctly un-Ahab-like way of relating to others as a disabled literary critic.1 It made Moby-Dick into a parable of compassion.
Moby-Dick begins with Ishmael’s acknowledgment that he suffers from “hypos” or depression, the symptoms of which become the defining features of his narrative: the sea voyage not as escape but as talking cure. It’s not unusual for someone trying to express the nature and depth of depression to grasp for material corollaries. What is notable in Ishmael’s account are which corollaries he reaches for and the ways they establish key elements of the story that follows. Ishmael knows he’s depressed because of exterior signs: physical changes (he is “growing grim around the mouth” [3]), which prefigure the repeated characterization of Ahab’s furrowed brow as a facial register of mental duress.2 Ishmael here likens his depression to inhospitable environments (the “damp, drizzly November in my soul” [3]), as he will later do with the sea and its inhabitants. Ishmael blames disability for Ahab’s violent impulses, as he does with his own aggressive action (his temptation to knock people’s hats off), and Ishmael’s fixation on symbolic objects (he pauses before coffin warehouses and joins in funeral processions) becomes Ahab’s obsession with significant objects (the doubloon, the quadrant, the forge, the specially made harpoon, and of course Moby-Dick himself). Ishmael’s connection of depression with seafaring takes material form in the “moody” and “vengeful” Pequod, an uncanny reflection of the same words repeatedly used to characterize Ahab. Ishmael’s own spells of depression, he further tells us, “get such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent” him from taking up pistol and ball, presumably to commit suicide. “With a philosophical flourish,” Ishmael ends his self-diagnosis, “Cato throws himself upon his sword; I quietly take to the ship” (3). Most important among all Ishmael’s projections, these “philosophical flourish[es]” he associates with suicidal depression become his characteristic narrative style, a rhetoric that allows Ishmael to register depression without speaking of it, to go “quietly” as narrator because the narrative itself is speaking for him. The story of the Pequod and its (suicidal) disaster, then, becomes the result of Ishmael’s disability, not Ahab’s, a fact made clear when the coffin that signifies his “hypos” becomes his salvation when the ship capsizes, a metaphor of the narrator’s depression made manifest as the object that enables the telling of the Pequod’s story.
My point is not that Ishmael can’t face his disability head on. Rather, I am arguing that the narrative of Moby-Dick is told not only about disability but from within it, as Ishmael tries, through Ahab’s story, to understand the social causes and consequences of disability generally, his own included. In doing so, Ishmael’s becomes an ambivalent narrative, reflective of the conflicting emotions that often accompany disability, both for disabled people and for others in relation to them. Ishmael’s narrative simultaneously turns away from Ahab’s disability and offers a remarkably astute and empathetic response to it. His often ham-fisted “philosophical flourishes” are the rhetorical equivalent of Ahab’s rage, both being responses to rather than origins of inhospitable, sometimes aggressive, social interactions. Ultimately, disability’s materiality frustrates efforts to displace it. This same materiality, however, also generates the alternatives Moby-Dick offers for encountering disability and subtends the power of those alternatives to reconfigure, rather than just reflect, social relations. My interest is in Ishmael’s insights into compassion, understood as a striving for connection that is mutual without being equivalent, and that is projective and self-surrendering, an exchange of vulnerabilities and care that is at once generous and risky.
•••
Before getting to that, though, I offer a coming-out narrative, a series of encounters with and in Moby-Dick, a confession, and a proposal. First, the coming out: I’m legally blind. When I was twenty-one, I underwent then-experimental laser treatments to remove aneurysms from my retinas. Twice a week for two months, hundreds of laser shots, each like a hot needle, penetrated my retinas. Shortly thereafter, in a coughing fit, I blew out a capillary weakened by the lasers, filling my left eye with blood, and I required old-school surgery to replace the vitreous (the gel-like matter of the eyeball). As a result of the treatments and the surgery, I now have no peripheral vision, poor depth perception, and little capacity for light adjustment. When I look straight ahead I see only the scar tissue from the lasers, like those scientific illustrations of galaxies but made of hundreds of shimmering purple lights, like the aftereffect of a camera flash.
With the extraordinary help of friends, teachers, and family who taped my classes, read aloud to me, and typed my dictated papers, I finished college. Eventually my eyes began to adjust to seeing around the scar tissue. With the help of magnifying lenses (and now with the inestimable boon of the huge fonts available on e-readers), my eyes scan back and forth over a word, picking up small fragments of letters, until an entire word comes together, a task that is very slow and, after a couple hours, gives me severe headaches. And yet despite sound advice against it, I not only started graduate school in English but, hardwired with an almost comic stubbornness and capacity for repression, specialized in the field boasting the longest novels, nineteenth-century American literature. I have to admit that what first drew me to the field was how long the novels are (I read the 180,242 words of Uncle Tom’s Cabin in my first semester, and then moved on to the 206,050 words of Moby-Dick). Adversity overcome is a hackneyed narrative but nevertheless experientially meaningful for those who live it out.
But adversity is the gift that keeps on giving, and every effort to deny what separated me from other readers left—leaves—me, paradoxically, with a deeper sense of isolation. In my case, not only has my shame about being blind kept me from discussing its challenges with others who might share my experiences, but the constant visual presence of the glowing scar tissue creates a literal and inescapable barrier between me and everything else. Above all, there’s an affective isolation: the frustration when people ask me to read something I can’t; the embarrassment of being greeted by someone whose face I can’t see, so I can’t respond appropriately; the anxiety of entering a dark space and not knowing if there are stairs to fall down or walls to walk into; the resentment at those who can accomplish in a fraction of the time what it takes me days to finish; and as a result of all these, periodic depression and anger, arising unexpectedly, out of proportion, often at the worst moments.
So when I found Ishmael’s sympathetic depiction of these emotions in an unexpected place, my pleasure was vertiginous. It was, to use a neologism Melville might have liked, the melancholy pleasure of lonelessness. That’s what I felt when, after having not reread the book for some time, I came to Chapter 100 of Moby-Dick, in which the Pequod encounters the British whaler Samuel Enderby. Ahab shouts his $64,000 question—Hast thou seen the damned White Whale?—and, when the other captain replies by raising a prosthetic arm, Ahab, overcome with excitement, orders a boat to convey him to the other ship. In his excitement, however, Ahab, who himself wears a prosthesis, “had forgotten that since the loss of his leg he had never once stepped on board of any vessel at sea but his own, and then it was always by an ingenious and very handy mechanical contrivance peculiar to the Pequod, and a thing not to be rigged and shipped in any other vessel at a moment’s warning” (436–37). Finding himself “deprived of one leg, and the strange ship of course being altogether unsupplied with the kindly invention, Ahab now found himself abjectly reduced to a clumsy landsman again; hopelessly eyeing the uncertain changeful height he could hardly hope to attain” (437). Here Ishmael describes a very different Ahab from the man in the rest of the novel: abject, reduced, clumsy, and—so terrible it gets repeated—“hopelessly eyeing” what he could not “hope to attain.” Yanked from his enthusiastic forgetfulness, this Ahab—so different from the willful tyrant we’re more familiar with—is startled and confused, realizing in a moment that his world is no longer his (he has become “a clumsy landsman again”). Those affects, however, and the loss that fuels them have never been far from the surface for Ahab, who sixty-four chapters earlier tells Starbuck that the loss of his leg “made a poor pegging lubber of me for ever and a day!” (163). The loss that provokes Ahab’s rage is deep and persistent, and little wonder, given that his will becomes fused with the material accommodations required by his physical limitations—“my fixed purpose is laid with iron rails,” Ahab says, “whereon my soul is grooved to run” (168). When Ishmael describes the hole that allows Ahab to stand steady as “his standpoint,” he suggests that Ahab’s disposition has become synonymous with his dismemberment (161). Having become not a captain, or even a person, but a disability personified, the “crazy” captain is not so much mad as angry.
Ahab’s emotions in this moment of crisis are familiar to me in a very material way. Here’s my own moment of hitting the waters without a leg to stand on: At a recent Modern Language Association (MLA) convention, I was to speak on a panel I was looking forward to with tremendous excitement. When the time came, however, I couldn’t find the room, as the numbers were above the doors where I couldn’t read them, and I was too embarrassed to ask for help—I can’t see faces or read name tags, so I’m in a constant state of anxiety at conferences that I’ll confuse a friend for a stranger or vice versa, which usually keeps me from addressing anyone until spoken to first—until it was too late and the halls were empty. I did ultimately find the room, thanks to a janitor who rushed over after I fell down a short flight of stairs. But then, to my embarrassment, I found that the panelists had waited for my arrival to start, so all (annoyed) eyes were on me as I rushed up to the dais, where the moderator asked me to go first. I didn’t have time to check the lighting, and when I reached the podium it was too dark for me to read from my notes. I started to freak out and my hands began shaking to the point where I couldn’t hold the paper, from which I was uselessly attempting to read, so I put it down and tried to improvise. Train wreck. So bad people tweeted about it. Embarrassed, confused, reduced, hopeless, I found myself in the same boat as Ahab.
I’ve done a lot of thinking about that MLA experience and its relation to my identification with Ahab (and, through Ahab, with Ishmael). For starters, it made me take seriously what the novel tells us about the causes and consequences of Ahab’s negative affects. For weeks after that convention I was angry: at the people in the hallways who must have seen me running around squinting up at room numbers but didn’t ask if I needed help; at the other panelists who, seeing me struggle, didn’t offer to read the paper; at the audience members who tweeted about my mortifying performance. But below all that anger was loss and fear. Every task in my life—particularly my professional life—involves enormous amounts of reading. If I really can’t read—enough, as much, at all—how can I be the person I’ve spent my life working to be? These are the foundation-shaking questions I can usually ignore in order to keep going as if the fear is groundless, but every stumble, every bewilderment, brings danger to the surface, and when the flight instinct isn’t an option, fight is what there is. But where—and to what degree—is anger legitimate? Directed at whom? And if anger is surrendered to its more vulnerable core affects—loss, anxiety, fear—what other kinds of responses might prevent the catastrophic consequences when Ahab can’t dial it back?
Ishmael offers some answers when he gives Ahab’s imperious rage a backstory: “Every little untoward circumstance that befell him, and which indirectly sprang from his luckless mishap, almost invariably irritated or exasperated Ahab” (437). Here the “monomania” that seems to cause the novel’s ill-fated events itself has a deeper cause in the difficulties Ahab constantly encounters due to his lost leg. But that cause, too, has an origin in “every little untoward circumstance.” Many of those “circumstances” are material—an unsteady deck, the fragility of whalebone, severely diminished mobility—but some are also interpersonal. And here things get interesting, because Ishmael is not (only) representing the crew as the innocent brunt of Ahab’s rage. Ahab is reminded of his “mishap” by the injury itself, but also by the responses of those around him. When Stubb (his name seems Ishmael’s dark joke), after complaining to Ahab that “the reverberating crack and din of that bony step” fills the dreams of the crew sleeping below with “the crunching teeth of sharks,” suggests that “there might be some way of muffling the noise” by means of “a globe of tow” in which the tip of the prosthesis might be inserted, Ahab, feeling himself made a thing, responds, “Am I a cannon-ball, Stubb, . . . that thou wouldst wad me that fashion?” And having had his disability pointed out to him (“I had forgot,” Ahab says), he manifests what Ishmael points out is a defensive anger, having been made responsible for others’ reactions to his disability, by kicking Stubb (127).
Like many people with disabilities, Ahab is the object of too much and too little attention, of gawking and avoidance. Even though many aboard the Pequod talk about Ahab’s dismemberment, no one talks to him about it. Ishmael reports, “By some tacit consent, throughout the voyage little or no allusion was made” (123) to Ahab’s disabling encounter with the whale, an avoidance that renders Ahab “as unnecessary there as another mast” (125). Yet responding to the fact that he is also too visible, Ahab snaps at Starbuck, “Take off thine eye! more intolerable than fiends’ glarings is a doltish stare!” (164). Other instances of callous reactions to disability abound in Moby-Dick. There are the sailors of the Samuel Enderby, who “did not seem to bethink them that a one-legged man must be too much of a cripple to use their sea banisters” (437). And then there is the captured whale for which “pity there was none. For all his old age, and his one arm, and his blind eyes, he must die the death and be murdered” (357). Ultimately, Ahab is associated with a whale (the one-armed whale and the one-legged captain, the latter lifted aboard ship on a blubber hook), and a fatally fast one at that.
Such treatment produces in Ahab a need for human connection that takes the form of a hunger to see his experience reflected by someone else. That need becomes clear in the encounter with the captain of the Samuel Enderby, when Ahab’s excitement at meeting someone he believes shares his experience matches my own in encountering Ahab blind. Prior to this encounter, Ahab was interested in other captains only for their knowledge of the whereabouts of Moby Dick. But his meeting with Boomer is different. Rather than immediately asking about the whale, Ahab draws attention to the prostheses they both wear: “Let us shake bones together!—an arm and a leg!—an arm that never can shrink, d’ye see; and a leg that never can run” (437). Anticipating a story of triumphant determination (no running, no shrinking), Ahab demands of Boomer, “Spin me the yarn” (438).
But Ahab’s insistence that Boomer represent an uncomplicated, triumphant experience of disability prevents him from seeing the other captain’s shame, anger, and loss, and therefore also keeps him from recognizing his own. Despite his apparent forthrightness, waving the prosthetic arm in response to Ahab’s call, and his jovial response to Ahab’s demand for a story—“‘Give me a chance then,’ said the Englishman, good humoredly” (438)—Boomer is not as self-accepting as he appears. Rather than telling the story himself, he turns to the ship’s surgeon, crying, “Bunger boy, spin your part of the yarn” (439). What ensues is a series of interruptions by Boomer, who belittles and baffles his surgeon with interpolations like “Bunger, you dog, laugh out! why don’t ye? You know you’re a precious jolly rascal” (439–40). The story is serious: a spur from a harpoon attached to Moby Dick caught Boomer at the shoulder and ripped down the length of his arm before emerging at his wrist, leading to gangrene and amputation. But Boomer refuses it the gravity Ahab’s urgency demands, not because he has reconciled himself to his injury but because humor, for Boomer, keeps the incident’s physicality at bay. The fact that Boomer can order up a recital of what he calls “the arm story” (440) suggests that it serves as the kind of repeated narration that, trauma theory tells us, offers apparently coherent content to the disordered, or often blank, experience of survivors. As with such survivors, Boomer’s recollection of the events is occluded, psychic disorganization becoming literal blindness; at the moment the spur grabs his arm, Boomer tells us, “I was blind as a bat—both eyes out—all befogged and bedeadened with black foam” (438). But Boomer’s constant disruptions suggest his need to resist the traumatic closure of the story, and his belittling jokes begin whenever the doctor gets close to the material details of the amputation. His defensive humor sometimes becomes outright hostility. Bunger tells Ahab that Boomer “spins us many clever things,” but also that his captain, like Ahab, “flies into diabolical passions sometimes” (440) and that Boomer has had the end of his prosthetic arm shaped as a hammer’s head to vent his rage—like Ahab—on his crew.
Not surprisingly, given how close this all cuts to the bone, Ahab soon grows irritably impatient with the “by-play between the two Englishmen” (440). The irony, however, is that Boomer has in important ways reflected Ahab back to himself: both men experience turbulent emotions because of their amputations, both choose at times to hide their prostheses from public view (Ishmael tells us that on first approach Boomer’s arm was “hidden” beneath the folds of a cloak), both desire recognition (Boomer’s calling to Bunger to tell his story) yet refuse it when it’s offered. The problem is, first, that Ahab asks Boomer to recognize (“d’ye see?”) what the latter doesn’t want to see, and second, that he has, in the bravado of his toast to their prostheses, denied the abjection, loss, and bewilderment that he has experienced just moments before but does not want to recognize in himself.
This painful scene between the two disabled captains is arguably another of Ishmael’s displacements, “the arm story” reflecting his leg tale, with all its similar shame and desire. For Ishmael, the lack of recognition preventing the two captains’ mutual recognition encapsulates the dynamic of encountering disabled bodies, dematerializing them rhetorically, but finally returning to the persistent matter of disability. Passing through this dynamic, Ishmael repeatedly becomes “vague,” capable, that is, of neither full recognition nor avoidance, stuck in between, where matter refuses to disappear into “philosophical flourishes.”
This pattern first appears at the start of the narrative, when Ishmael wanders into the New Bedford Whaleman’s Chapel, where, he observes, each parishioner “seemed purposely sitting apart from the other as if each silent grief were insular and incommunicable” (34). The “seemed” here puts a distance between Ishmael and embodied grief (why does the insularity of grief seem when the parishioners are sitting apart from each other?), and Ishmael goes further by turning grief into simile (the body as if grieving), an effort belied by his tautology (grief appears “as if” grief). Yet Ishmael persists, blurring the distinction between physical and metaphysical pain: “What deadly voids and unbidden infidelities in the lines that seem to gnaw upon all Faith, and refuse resurrections to the beings who have placelessly perished without a grave” (36). Here Ishmael is caught between physical gnawing (men overboard might well be “gnawed” by sharks or whales) and metaphor (gnawing as apostasy), and the result is narrative uncertainty, as Ishmael claims that Mapple’s isolated sanctity “must symbolize something” (39), but nothing Ishmael can determine.
Father Mapple, who delivers his sermon isolated in a pulpit shaped like a ship’s prow, to which he ascends on a rope ladder, foreshadows the isolated Ahab, who bears “a crucifixion in his face” (124). As Ishmael gets closer to Ahab himself, however, his skills at finding meaning in physical disability are more strenuously tested. While preparing to sign onto the Pequod’s crew, Ishmael is confronted by Elijah, his face marked by smallpox, his arm disfigured, and, in Ishmael’s estimation, insane, even though Elijah tells only the literal truth. Faced with this multiply disabled figure, Ishmael goes into another rhetorical tailspin: “his ambiguous, half-hinting, half-revealing, shrouded sort of talk,” Ishmael reports, “now begat in me all kinds of vague wonderments and half-apprehensions” (93). Caught between embodiment and the desire for “meaning” (note the repeated use of “half” here), Ishmael appeals to Elijah’s biblical name to turn his words into prophecy, but that strategy is frustrated when Ishmael mentions the biblical allegory of Ahab, and Captain Peleg tells him the name was “a foolish, ignorant whim of his crazy, widowed mother” (79). One disability (Ahab’s “crazy” mother) frustrates his allegorical efforts to avoid another, a cycle Ishmael repeats when Peleg offers a detailed account of Ahab’s dismemberment and subsequent insanity. Ishmael reports that the narration “filled me with a certain wild vagueness of painfulness concerning him [Ahab]. And somehow, at the time I felt a sympathy and a sorrow for him, but for I don’t know what, unless it was the cruel loss of his leg” (79–80). Here “vagueness” seems to be Ishmael’s response to Peleg’s story, putting the distance of speculation between the account and his own emotions: the story he has just heard has “somehow” awakened sympathy, but when Ishmael claims not to know for certain the cause of his compassion “unless it was the cruel loss of his leg,” the “unless” betrays his desire for other explanations than Ahab’s painful experience.
Twice in these examples Ishmael becomes “vague,” a word that can signify a material indefiniteness or a lack of clarity in meaning. In Ishmael’s case, both meanings pertain: he repeatedly attempts to put disability out of focus through unsuccessful rhetorical efforts to dematerialize it into clear, complete “meaning.” The more pronounced the disability, the more high-flying the “philosophical flourishes,” the more confounding the vagueness. This becomes clearest in regard to Moby Dick, with his broken jaw, albino hue, and multiple wounds. That striking, even grotesque, embodiment produces the most metaphysical chapter in Moby-Dick, Chapter 42, “The Whiteness of the Whale,” the only place, after the novel’s first chapter, to refer to Ishmael’s “hypos.” In that chapter, Ishmael is thrown into rhetorical vagueness when he puts aside “those more obvious considerations touching Moby Dick” only to find them replaced by a “vague, nameless horror” (188). In that state, Ishmael writes that “so mystical and well nigh ineffable” was Moby Dick “that I almost despair of putting it in a comprehensible form” (188). That the whale is only “well nigh” ineffable is an understatement: his is the tail to end all tales. Not only does his physical bulk capsize the Pequod, but the closer the ship gets to Moby Dick, the less philosophical and more plot-driven the narrative becomes, as the whale asserts its disabled presence with a vengeance. Even as Moby Dick departs, however, Ishmael remains caught between the literal and the figurative, as he clings to the coffin that is both mercifully material and suggestively symbolic (recall how Ishmael turns Peter Coffin into a sign of the disaster to come). Unable to achieve either “muteness or universality” (193), saying nothing or saying too much, Ishmael in the end is still at sea, having never learned the lesson offered by Starbuck: “The hunt should in some way be stripped of that strange imaginative impiousness.”
If, as I’ve argued, Ahab, struggling with his ambivalence toward his own disability, serves as Ishmael’s avatar, it is not surprising that the captain suffers most from the narrator’s rhetorical dematerialization, which, like averted eyes, threatens Ahab with invisibility. For example, in Chapter 106, fittingly titled “Ahab’s Leg,” Ishmael struggles with the dissonance between his understanding of Ahab’s prosthesis and the captain’s. For Ishmael, Ahab’s dismemberment is abstract and universal, an allegory of “the ancestry and posterity of Grief,” giving “all heart-woes, a mystic significance” (464). Ahab becomes, in Ishmael’s handling, “but a vacated thing,” a “ray of living light, to be sure, but without an object to color, and therefore a blankness in itself” (202). Despite Ishmael’s attempt to “vacate” Ahab, however, the captain insists on the specificity and materiality of his disability. When Ahab, leaving the Samuel Enderby, “lighted with such energy upon a thwart of his boat that his ivory leg had received a half-splintering shock,” Ishmael considers the crack insignificant, “yet Ahab did not deem [the ivory leg] entirely trustworthy. And, indeed, it seemed small matter for wonder that for all his prevailing mad recklessness, Ahab did at times give careful heed to the condition of that dead bone upon which he partly stood” (463). Ahab’s care for his prosthesis—“with all the studs and joists of jaw-ivory” (465)—makes “matter” the stuff of wonder, forcing Ishmael to surrender his high-flying metaphysics to someone with more skill in working such matters: “Let the unseen ambiguous synod in the air, or the vindictive princes and potentates of fire, have to do or not with earthly Ahab, yet, in this present matter of his leg, he took plain practical procedures;—he called the carpenter” (465).
Although Ishmael’s rhetoric often ends in vagueness, disability resisting its dematerialization, I don’t want to sell him short. Disability gives rise to more than avoidance in Moby-Dick. It also generates the narrative’s—and hence the novel’s—defining style. Full of breaks, awkward digressions, halting plots, and incidental anecdotes, Ishmael’s story, like Ahab, limps. This is more than a cringeworthy metaphor: Ahab’s dismemberment has become the basis of what scholars identify as a disability aesthetics.3 For Tobin Siebers, such an aesthetic challenges the ideal of beauty based on bodily integrity, health, and internal harmony (Ishmael enacts that challenge, perhaps, when he kills off the ideal of conventional masculine beauty, Bulkington). Noting that “aesthetics suppresses its underlying corporeality only with difficulty,” Siebers helps us see how Ishmael’s attempts to dematerialize the disabled body produces a “difficult” aesthetic, but he also suggests how “experimentation with aesthetic form reflects a desire to experiment with human form,” which may explain Ishmael’s attraction to Queequeg’s tattooed or, later, sick body, his dismantling of systems of bodily or natural classification, or his sensitivity to the difficulties confronting Ahab due to his dismemberment.4 Throughout Moby-Dick, what Siebers calls an “aesthetics of human disqualification”—standards of wholeness that disqualify both Ishmael and Ahab from the normative human and social body—produces a different aesthetic that makes art in the shape of the disabled body.5 The conflicts narrated by Ishmael have been steps toward the final triumph of disability’s materiality as manifested in the style of the prose.
But Ishmael also shows the need for compassion as a social principle and demonstrates that receiving compassion is as important—and as difficult—as extending it. In Ishmael’s account, Ahab denies Boomer compassionate recognition, both because he can’t recognize Boomer’s trauma without acknowledging his own and because his excessive pride, a denial of his own vulnerabilities, makes Ahab insensible of acts of compassion on the part of others. (An emblematic moment is Ahab’s insistence on helping to “hoist his own weight by pulling hand-over-hand upon one of the running parts” of the blubber tackle, even though the sailors of the Samuel Enderby are raising him “carefully” [437].) Refusing to recognize compassion, Ahab becomes incapable of receiving or extending it, reinforcing the isolation that made his encounter with Boomer so exhilarating in the first place.
•••
So what would it take to let Ahab off the hook? To answer that, I turn to compassion not as an aesthetic but as a socially transformative effect of disability’s materiality. Let me return to my experience at MLA by way of my confession and modest proposal. When I stopped being mad at other people, I realized that I was most angry at myself. Why hadn’t I asked someone to read the paper for me when I realized I couldn’t? Why had I not put aside my embarrassment and asked someone to help me find the room? Why didn’t I insist that we put off starting until I got a better light? Why did I care what people tweeted? Pride, sure. But also something more disturbing. And here’s the confession: I don’t trust people very much. Receiving compassion is not just a question of suspending pride; it’s about extending generosity. And when push comes to shove, I have a hard time being generous enough.
I am taking practical—even material—steps, however, to throw my inner Ahab a lifeline. After the MLA conference I registered with a state agency for the visually impaired and trained in walking with a low-vision stick. The stick is a sign to others to keep an eye on me (I have been hit a few times by bicyclists and even once by a car driver, all of whom assumed I could see them in my periphery and would step back). But it’s also—and this is the hard part for me—a sign to keep an eye out for me, for the fact that I may not know where I’m going or what’s in front of me or what traffic signs are signaling or whose face I’m looking at. It’s a sign, in short, that I may need help.
My first extended experiences of walking with the stick were during six weeks I spent in London. I anticipated gawking, annoyance, even the occasional rude remark, and there was some of that. But mostly I experienced what I could never have anticipated. Late one night, leaving the theater, I got lost. Not seeing other pedestrians and unable to read street signs, I saw and hailed a taxi. When I got in, shaking, near tears, I blurted, “It’s scary getting lost when you’re blind,” and the driver responded, “You’re safe now. I’ve got you.” As we drove along we talked about the cityscapes of London and New York, which he hoped soon to visit, and when we arrived at my building he got out to help me to the door. I’ll admit that it had crossed my mind that the driver knew I couldn’t see and the drive was taking a little longer than seemed necessary. But when I asked about the fare, he said, “No, I don’t accept money from mates.” One afternoon a man who introduced himself as a tourist from Singapore took my arm in London’s National Gallery to tell me about a play he had recently seen about the invention of braille, advising me to tell the box office I’m blind so they would discount my ticket. Another afternoon, at an intersection where I couldn’t see the pedestrian signal, a young woman carrying flowers asked if I needed help. As we walked along, she told me about the fight she had had with her roommate, for whom she had bought the flowers, and asked my advice on how to set things right. Throughout my stay in London, at the espresso bar where I sat most days, Jonathan, the owner, would bring me a pastry on the house and chat with me about his childhood in Paris. My most astonishing experience came when I was waiting patiently one afternoon for an outdoor table at a different café and, when one finally opened, some people rushed from inside and grabbed it. The owner, seeing what had happened, brought a table out for me, at which point a man from the table-grabbing group pulled his chair over to my table, apologized for his friends, and talked with me about his work as an environmental consultant. When he asked what I was reading and I said Moby-Dick, he told me that he had a long-standing interest in the whaling industry and especially in—wait for it—Samuel Enderby.
These encounters demonstrate people’s willingness to overcome embarrassment, suspend self-interest, open vulnerabilities, and spread—I’ll go ahead and say it—goodness. Such acts of goodness are still difficult to accept; I’m shy with strangers, don’t like people to touch me, and very often couldn’t care less about other people’s problems. But I’m starting to see the pleasure in such acts. Part of that pleasure comes in recognizing what I may be offering by accepting help. Etymologically, “compassion” means “to suffer together,” even “to undergo together.” What is it to come together in compassion? In the encounters in London, as the object of people’s compassion I like to believe I enabled their becoming who they wanted to be. They were risking their own vulnerabilities, which weren’t the same as mine (or each other’s) or necessarily equivalent, but which were affectively proximate, a ground on which communication started. I think I became an occasion for their expressions of and reflections on other—better—versions of themselves; I gave them, to use a metaphor Melville might approve, different moorings. I think that explains why when the people I encountered were helping me, they, in almost every case, began telling me something about themselves, especially about other places and times, about their aspirations and commitments. And I think they were grateful for the opportunity to be the people they were in those stories—generous, sensitive, aspiring, wistful—and hence their offering of something back, whether it was a fare, a pastry, advice, or a memory. They had taken the compassionate risk of reaching out and, however difficult, I was willing to be the destination of that reach.
These are small moments, and in these difficult times they might seem trivial. But their smallness makes them worth pausing over. In The Practices of Hope I argue that too often today literary criticism traffics in clear and absolute oppositions, allowing for uncomplicated and often ungenerous generalizations that ignore what, when we aren’t being critics, we know about people (perhaps especially ourselves) and their complicated, difficult-to-characterize intentions, complicities, and beliefs.6 Such generalizations become possible when people and their everyday, material lives become abstractions, when, like Ishmael, we make small acts vague. I think we need to reassess the generosity possible in literary criticism if it is to have immediate, tangible consequences. We are not all disabled, but a lot of us, for a variety of reasons, feel like Ahab: caught in an inescapable mishap, bewildered, angry, maybe even hopeless. More vulnerability, more compassion, at such times may seem like a useless prescription, especially if we look at compassion as pity, concession, or weakness. After he returns from his meeting with Captain Boomer, Ahab, having cracked his prosthesis in his hasty exit, needs the Pequod’s carpenter to make him another. Bemoaning that, “proud as a Greek god,” he must stand “debtor to this blockhead for a bone to stand on!” (471), Ahab curses “that mortal inter-indebtedness” (471). Denying the “unaccountable, cunning life-principle” (468), Ahab can see assistance only as debt, and debt only as weakness. But as my London encounters show, it is far better, far braver, to give ourselves to our transformative, compassionate attachments to the world and to each other if we want to avoid going down with the ship.
1. Here I depart from the reading of Moby-Dick by David T. Mitchell and Sharon L. Snyder, who argue that because of his disability, Ahab is denied the flexible interiority enjoyed by Ishmael. Because they conflate “Melville” and the narrative voice, Mitchell and Snyder miss that the narrator is himself disabled, that Ahab is his creation, and therefore that he suffers from the same association of subjectivity and disability that Ahab does. Insofar as Ahab is static, it is, I am arguing, because he is figured as such by those around him, not because “Melville”—or even Ishmael—sees him as such. Mitchell and Snyder, Narrative Prosthesis: Disability and the Dependencies of Discourse (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2014).
2. Herman Melville, Moby-Dick; or, The Whale (Evanston: Northwestern University Press; Chicago: Newberry Library, 2001). All references noted parenthetically in the text.
3. See Tobin Siebers, Disability Aesthetics (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2010); Michael Davidson, Concerto for the Left Hand: Disability and the Defamiliar Body (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2008); Michael Bérubé, The Secret Life of Stories: From Don Juan to Harry Potter (New York: NYU Press, 2016); and Ato Quayson, Aesthetic Nervousness: Disability and the Crisis of Representation (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007).
4. Siebers, Disability Aesthetics, 1, 10.
5. Siebers, Disability Aesthetics, 44.
6. Christopher Castiglia, The Practices of Hope: Literary Criticism in Disenchanted Times (New York: NYU Press, 2017).