Matthew A. Taylor
Where does Ahab go when he dies? Having harpooned the white whale, Ahab, caught by the umbilical line tying his life to Moby Dick’s death, is born into the abyss, nevermore to be seen.1 Exit Ahab.
But where does Ahab go when he dies? Asked obsessively (albeit proleptically) in Moby-Dick, it’s a question perhaps answered three years later in “The Encantadas”: all “wicked sea-officers” and “especially . . . captains,” according to sailor lore, “are at death . . . transformed into tortoises” that endlessly wander the hellish “Tartarus” of the Galápagos Islands.2 Like Ahab, these “strangely self-condemned” creatures are defined by their “impulse to straightforwardness in a belittered world,” “striving, tooth and nail, to force [their] impossible passages”—their “hopeless toil” in “ram[ming] themselves heroically against rocks . . . in order to . . . hold on their inflexible path” (“The Encantadas,” 768, 771) mirroring Ahab’s own unswerving soul (“Swerve me? . . . Through the rifled hearts of mountains . . . unerringly I rush! Naught’s an obstacle . . . to the iron way!” [Moby-Dick, 168]). Equally “straight-forward monsters” and geological agencies, Ahab and tortoise alike seem cursed by some “diabolical enchanter” to capsize in the attempt to “never [turn] aside for any impediment” (“The Encantadas,” 772, 771). Add to this Melville’s recurring interest in “metempsychosis” (Moby-Dick, 429) and the “transmigration of souls,” and we very well might ask, “Is Ahab, Ahab?” (Moby-Dick, 545).3
In death as in life, it isn’t clear. I am less interested in reincarnating Ahab, however, than I am in using the possibility of him “surviv[ing] [him]self” (à la Ishmael) as an occasion to think through the implications of Melville’s conception of the afterlife—or, rather, his conception of what comes after the erasure of the conventional life–death divide (Moby-Dick, 228). In fact, rather than asking where Ahab goes after dying, we might instead wonder what it means to say that Ahab lived or died at all.
To explore this life-and/or-death question, I will exhume both the death-in-life of Ahab’s existence aboard the Pequod and his possible life-in-death within the Galápagos’s “penal conflagration” (“The Encantadas,” 764). Such a comparison, I believe, illuminates the metaphysics behind Ishmael’s half-grasped intuition that “we have hugely mistaken this matter of Life and Death” (Moby-Dick, 37). And it is a strange metaphysics, indeed. Against the prevailing orthodoxies that death is life’s absence or aftermath, Melville posits their impossible simultaneity. Living, for Melville, is a phase or stage of dying, a forgetting of the death on either side—and at the heart—of life. Under a godless pantheism in which the universality of “Life” is predicated on both a self-consuming voracity and an all-benumbing automatism, life and death remain nominally distinct but finally indissociable and comorbid. Within such a universe, the nonliving have the same appearance of life as the ostensibly living (inanimate things frequently act as if alive in Melville’s fiction), but it is, for both, only an appearance, a trick of perspective produced by an endless expiration, death rattle, or de-ceasing. The inorganic, the organic, the unborn, and the departed are thus conjoined in an undead life, as Melville, echoing both the Wöhler synthesis and its hylozoic complement, collapses the living–dead divide.
For another author this concurrence of life and death might connote harmony, reciprocity, or equality (life comes from death just as death follows life in an endless, regenerative cycle). For Melville it indicates death’s precedence over life. “Life” and “death” may alternate, that is, and they might actually cohabitate, but the alternation and cohabitation are themselves void of vitality; a living death, not eternal rebirth, inspirits Moby-Dick and “The Encantadas.”4 Indeed, in Melville’s ontology even resurrection is a deadening affair, a recurrence of death or a self-spectralizing fugue rather than a return of life. Tortoise-Ahab is thus more recrudescence than redemption, more lifeless re-formation than life-giving Reformation, as reptile and man are revealed to embody a self-destructive cosmos. Put another way, Melville envisions the offspring of “wedded life and death” to be not a transcendental vitality that overcomes the grave but an immanent lethality that vitiates all life.5 Yet this isn’t mere entropy, which presumes the possibility of reaching a final equilibrium. It is something far weirder: an eternal rest-lessness, pictured variously as perpetual rotting, murdering, haunting, or automatizing with no vestige of a beginning and no prospect of an end—what Moby-Dick labels an “endless end” (Moby-Dick, 476).6 Melville’s conjunction of living and dying, therefore, offers not spiritual solace or resolution but “a certain nameless terror” accompanied, occasionally, by a certain mortal beauty—a sepulchritude (Moby-Dick, 191).
In this denial of a living salvation, Melville challenges the premises of the anthropocentric natural theologies, transcendentalisms, and evolutionary theories circulating in his age. Melville scholarship has thoroughly traced these various influences, from Lorenz Oken and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe to Robert Chambers and Louis Agassiz, among many others.7 My interest lies in what unites them: the explicit linking of biological life to teleological ends. In these otherwise unrelated and often antithetical cosmologies, an ascending scale of life testifies to a cosmic law that guarantees humanity’s priority and purposefulness. As such, they make up part of what Michel Foucault and others identify as the early nineteenth-century shift toward imagining life as a regulatory principle that simultaneously subtends and transcends the living—and dictates how life should be lived.8 Life, in short, becomes sovereign over the living, setting the terms of being (who, how, when, and why) so that what accords with life will flourish and what does not will, naturally, perish.
This normative power of life-in-itself or life-as-such is, in Foucault’s account, one of the primary engines of biopolitics, and it is what many latter-day biophilosophies explicitly target for revision. For all their many and important differences, recent new materialisms (e.g., Jane Bennett’s), neovitalisms (e.g., Elizabeth Grosz’s), and affirmative forms of biopolitics (e.g., Roberto Esposito’s) share this common cause: to reengineer “life” in order to counter its conscription by lethally racist, sexist, speciesist, and homophobic ideologies.9 Against previous conceptions of life as rigidly hierarchical and teleological, these theories champion life’s egalitarian dynamism, flexibility, and contingency—and, in the case of the new materialisms, they even extend its agency, independence, and activity to the conventionally nonliving (from atoms to stones to the universe as a whole). In so doing, they all picture a liberated life midwifing a new, healthier world. This is necropolitics reborn as what might be called, only half ironically, a prolife ecopolitics.10
For such a promise to be coherent, however, these discourses must remain invested, like the traditions they aim to correct, in life’s supreme value and normativity. The specific values and norms have evolved (e.g., from closed system to open-ended process), but life itself still acts as both medium and template for ethicopolitical change, guiding individuals and societies toward truer forms of existence; the tonic for revitalizing our moribund world is, still, greater fidelity to life’s own immanent principles and processes. Although the allure of these discourses’ objectives is obvious, their assumption that social, ecological, and existential problems can be solved via recourse to biological life repeats rather than remedies the mortal error of past Lebensphilosophien (life philosophies). The problem, that is, lies not in the deconstruction of previous conceptions of life but in the belief that a newly revitalized conception necessarily affords a blueprint for progressive change. Updating the meaning of “life”—making it democratically pluralistic, protean, and diverse—doesn’t address the fatal mistake of assuming it to be a concrete concept or thing rather than an abstract cipher that, historically and conceptually, far too easily slips into privileging some life forms over others.11 Life, that is, cannot be trusted, cannot be the “is” from which we derive a living “ought.”
In this respect, Melville’s living–dead metaphysics proves a useful rejoinder not only to his age’s optimism regarding “life” but also to ours. He stipulates the nonanthropocentric fluidity and interconnectedness of “life,” he grants that everything is “alive,” but he reveals these qualities to be the source rather than the salve of life’s horrors. Melville’s work repeatedly insists on both the damningly phantasmatic nature of life and, relatedly, its merciless evisceration of the seemingly living. Confounding any effort to find in life (or death) a positive ethics or politics, Melville thus preemptively imagines an alternative to biopower and its new materialist redemptions, one that neither manages nor liberates life but acknowledges its continual self-destruction; here, living and dead alike testify to a mortal, perpetual ruination of the world that cannot be co-opted or redirected, only spectated. It is death as inexorable process rather than fixed event, which means that it is the will to power’s obverse: a post-Schopenhauerian, pre-Freudian death drive entombing all existence. Such a literal fatalism, I contend, mutes any attempt to speak in the name of life, killing life’s potential to serve or save us. It is the nature and significance of this thanato-vitalism that I will here attempt to reanimate. To do so, I will consider in turn Melville’s depictions of death’s spatialization within deep time, bodily amalgams of life and death, life’s parasitism or vampirism, and the lethality of an impersonal or universal life. Each of these foci reveals life to be a ghost of itself.
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Death’s nullification of life takes many forms in Melville. Most obvious is his repetition of the idea that death is life’s surety, ironic payment for lives never actually our own. “All dies!” intones the refrain of Melville’s uncollected poem “Pontoosuc,” “numbered . . . [are] the days of our lives” “The Lightning-Rod Man” reminds us, and “Death . . . levels all” resounds Moby-Dick (Moby-Dick, 477).12 Such statements might seem to be platitudes about life’s deathward course, but Melville presents them not only as presentiments of a future state but also as indices of an already existing reality. He achieves this isomorphism, in part, by making death as much a spatial phenomenon as a temporal one; following Charles Lyell and Georges Cuvier, his geology concretizes death as physical presence, the very ground we walk on. The adapted Faerie Queene epigraph to the first sketch of “The Encantadas,” for instance, casts the titular isles as “a greedy grave,” and the tales themselves depict the archipelago (the Galápagos Islands, which Melville visited on a whaling ship in 1841) as “the very body of cadaverous death,” a materialization “of once living things malignly crumbled from ruddiness into ashes” (“The Encantadas,” 764, 767).13 The islands thus testify both to the ephemerality of life and to death’s inescapable presence among the living. A mausoleum of “extinct volcanoes,” they are existence’s “cinders,” life’s remainders, death’s residua—like the “wandring ghosts” who there reside (“The Encantadas,” 767, 764).14 Dead but still extant: a haunting existence.
Of course, from the deep-time / null-time perspective that the stories encourage, we are all such ghosts, rendered living-dead by our past and future nonexistence. Prehuman and posthuman infinities here combine, with Ishmael’s “shuddering glimpse” of whales’ “eternities” applying equally to the islands: “I am horror-struck at this antemosaic, unsourced existence . . . which, having been before all time, must needs exist after all humane ages are over” (Moby-Dick, 457). Siding with Lyell’s indefinitely old—and “unsourced”—earth over Creationist temporalities that fixed the planet’s age at a few millennia, Melville flings the “fossilifer’s stone” like a revelation at genesis.15 We might say, then, that the islands’ “desolate vacuity of life” (in Moby-Dick’s phrase) leeches outward, becoming a universal apocalypse that effectively “uncreate[s]” us even while we live (Moby-Dick, 234; “The Encantadas,” 782). Far from being limited to a distant ocean expanse, geological time inters the entire earth.
The islands’ tortoises would seem to defy this perpetual, always-already extinction, however. Characterized by their “indefinite endurance,” they “resist the assaults of Time” and outlast “creatures whose very ghosts are now defunct” (“The Encantadas,” 771, 772). Explicitly recalling Darwin’s description in The Voyage of the Beagle (1839) of Galápagos tortoises as “seem[ing] . . . like some antediluvian animals,” Melville characterizes them as “antediluvian-looking” and “seem[ingly] hardly of the earth,” thus intimating that they might exist beyond death’s reach (“The Encantadas,” 770).16 As we have seen, though, their life is born of death, and they share the islands’ general ruination, appearing as “Roman Coliseums in magnificent decay” and as “exhumed slates” for “a geologist[’s]” study (“The Encantadas,” 771). They aren’t exceptions to the islands’ “uninhabitableness,” therefore (“The Encantadas,” 765); they are its vitreous extrusions, more firmament than fauna (“They seemed . . . crawled forth from beneath the foundations of the world” [“The Encantadas,” 770]).17 If, then, the tortoises are alive, they are also thrice dead (reincarnation, Roman ruin, earthly revenant). Living fossils avant la lettre, “both black and bright” like their shells, these “spectre-tortoise[s]” coincorporate life and death (“The Encantadas,” 770, 769).
So, too, does their belated progenitor, Ahab. Famously “dismasted” by Moby Dick, Ahab replaces his lost leg with a “dead stump” crafted from “the polished bone of the sperm whale’s jaw”—with the result being that “on life and death this old man walked” (Moby-Dick, 163, 124, 233). As with most of Melville’s many conjoined contraries, this one involves what Sharon Cameron describes as “antipodes which cannot be separated from each other, but which cannot be integrated either.”18 In Ahab, life and death indeed cohabitate without union, alternating with each step. In another text, this balancing act might suggest equality, even harmony. It might even imply the priority of life over death, as the dead part is apparently a single, unnaturally appended member of an otherwise living whole. If nothing else, this bodily amalgam would seem to insist on the opposition between life and death. And yet the scene—like the novel as a whole—indicates, to the contrary, that death props life up, is life’s foundation as well as end. Death here reveals itself to be life’s skeleton, the dead calcification structuring flesh, and Moby-Dick, an ossuary of a text, brims over with bones that make disturbingly visible this death-inhabited life.19 Seen from this perspective, Ahab’s ivory leg is less an odd end than an outgrowth of the deadness already within, giving the lie to Stubb’s rationalization, after being kicked by the whalebone extremity, that “there’s a mighty difference between a living thump and a dead thump” (“the living member—that makes the living insult,” he insists [Moby-Dick, 131]). Despite its comedy, there is nonetheless a cryptic truth inhumed in Stubb’s famously strange dream of kicking an Ahab who has transformed into a pyramid: Ahab—like a pyramid, like the living, like the novel itself—is a testament to a forever absenting life, a life that never arrives unencrypted. Thus, when, upon first losing his leg, “he lay like dead for three days and nights” and joined “the marble senate of the dead,” Ahab is not thereafter born into a new life; he emerges as he entered: queerly animated by death, only more visibly so (“his eyes glowing like coals, that still glow in the ashes of ruin” [Moby-Dick, 92, 464, 542–43]).
Unsurprisingly, Ahab’s antithetical anatomy is mirrored in a whale. In Chapter 102, “A Bower in the Arsacides,” Ishmael tells of his visit to a South Pacific island that possessed a perfect skeleton of a beached sperm whale. It is a remarkably lively death:
Amid the green, life-restless loom of that Arsacidean wood, the great, white, worshipped skeleton lay lounging—a gigantic idler! Yet, as the ever-woven verdant warp and woof intermixed and hummed around him, the mighty idler seemed the cunning weaver; himself all woven over with the vines; every month assuming greener, fresher verdure; but himself a skeleton. Life folded Death; Death trellised Life; the grim god wived with youthful Life, and begat him curly-headed glories. (Moby-Dick, 450)
This vignette perfectly captures what Melville’s journal labels “the intermingling of life & death.”20 The tapestry of life is here stitched with death, just as death’s architecture is mortared with life. “Over the gulf” that seems to divide them, “Life and Death . . . meet—infold!”21 But if this conjugal relation seems potentially both romantic and productive—issuing, as it does, in “curly-headed glories”—it is nonetheless necrophilic and, yet more macabre, initiated not by “youthful Life” but by the skeletal “grim god” Death (“the cunning weaver”); death, in short, is the author and model of life, and life but the costume of death, which portends the mortal inheritance of those grave-born, still-born “glories.”22 Tellingly, then, when Ishmael enters the skeleton, he sees “no living thing within; naught was there but bones” (Moby-Dick, 450). We might thus conclude that life is a kind of mirage or “optical delusion” flickering among the dead, but it would be more accurate to say that, for Melville, death makes life simultaneously real and spectral, actual and phantasmatic—“the ungraspable phantom of life” (“The Encantadas,” 768; Moby-Dick, 5). Like death, life is ghostly; like Ahab’s phantom leg, it is most present when absent (see Moby-Dick, 471).
For Melville, furthermore, the life–death ligature is logical (even ecological) as well as spatial or bodily, as evidenced by the fact that life requires death to remain ostensibly alive; as death consumes life, so life feeds on death in what Ishmael calls the “horrible vulturism of earth!” (Moby-Dick, 308). “The Encantadas” offers a literal example of death culturing life when a man abandoned by his captain on one of the barren Galápagos Islands “only saved his life by taking that of another being. . . . The palpitations of [a seal’s] dying heart inject[ed] life into the drinker,” and Moby-Dick, only slightly more abstractly, soaks in blood the lifestyles sustained by whaling: whales “must die the death and be murdered, in order to light the gay bridals and other merrymakings of men, and also to illuminate the solemn churches that preach unconditional inoffensiveness by all to all” (“The Encantadas,” 816; Moby-Dick, 357). In fact, Ahab’s suggestion that his murderous quest is “buoyed by breaths of once living things” dilates into a general principle in Melville’s work, with the entire earth’s “tide-beating heart” revealed to be pulsed by the “restles[s]” dead “l[ying]” at ocean’s bottom (Moby-Dick, 497, 483). To exist, whether on land or at sea, is to be “ballasted with bones of millions of the drowned” (Moby-Dick, 311); to be alive is to be complicit in what “The Encantadas” names a “riotocracy” (“The Encantadas,” 791) and Ishmael dubs a “universal cannibalism”: “Cannibals? who is not a cannibal?”; “we are all killers” (Moby-Dick, 274, 300, 143).23 In the “shocking sharkish business” of life, we, like the sharks frenzying over a whale carcass in Moby-Dick, “viciously sna[p], not only at each other’s disembowelments, but . . . ben[d] round, and bit[e] [our] own; till those entrails see[m] swallowed over and over again by the same mouth, to be oppositely voided by the gaping wound” (Moby-Dick, 293, 302).24 Unsated by mere cannibalism, we consume our own deaths, Ouroboros-like, that we might escape them.25 But, Melville insists, there is no escape; there is only the macabre repast (past, present, and future). “The latent horror” of “life,” then, is not simply that it “drag[s]” death in its “wake” but also that its apparent vivacity is only a death mask blushed with carnage: “All deified Nature absolutely paints like the harlot, whose allurements cover nothing but the charnel-house within. . . . Pondering all this, the palsied universe lies before us a leper” (Moby-Dick, 195). The horror, again, isn’t that death eats life from within; it’s that life itself is a phenomenal lie, a trick of leprous white light falsely prismed into an illusion of color. Life unshrouded is death, a moribund parasite, disease, or rot that kills itself to live (and lives to kill itself).26
Whereas eating ourselves to death might suggest narcissism, Melville indicates that the life we savor may not be our own. Moby-Dick is awash in contemporary discourses of pantheism, and, as Richard Hardack has demonstrated, the novel’s take is decidedly bleak.27 Significantly, one explicit reference comes in response to the aforementioned frenzied sharks: “It was unsafe to meddle with the corpses and ghosts of these creatures. A sort of generic or Pantheistic vitality seemed to lurk in” them “after . . . the individual life had departed” (Moby-Dick, 302). Theoretically, this doubling of life, individual and generic, could indicate plenitude, a superabundance of vitality guaranteeing something akin to immortality (this is transcendentalism at its most optimistic: our mundane deaths birth our ideal selves). In actuality, the scene is far more menacing. Pantheism’s association with threatening corpses and ghosts rather than benign world souls is telling enough (though “killed,” the sharks remain “murderous,” suggesting that whatever life they continue to live is a bloodthirsty one), but even more “unsafe” is generic vitality’s incompatibility with individuality, appearing only “after . . . the individual life ha[s] departed” (Moby-Dick, 302). A similar theme patterns Moby-Dick’s other invocations of pantheism: we access universal life—the “bottomless soul . . . pervading mankind and nature,” itself a kind of unholy ghost—only by “los[ing] [our] identity” (Moby-Dick, 159). The loss, like individual identity itself, both is and isn’t real (Melville consistently fathoms our persons and finds them simultaneously shallow and overflowing with alien agencies), but in either case, fusing with the absolute necessarily entails our absenting as distinct persons, our reduction to Galápagoan “ashes”: Ahab surmises that “the secret of our paternity lies in [the] grave,” and Ishmael’s masthead reverie envisions our “spirit ebb[ing] away to whence it came,” “becom[ing] diffused through time and space,” only at the risk of our plunging into the “Descartian vortices” over which we “hover” in mortal peril (Moby-Dick, 159, 492). That is, our “shad[ing] off into the surrounding infinite of things,” like that of the Pequod’s supposedly idiosyncratic carpenter, requires our becoming shades, phantasmatic shadows, or after-lives. In a twist on Foucault’s famous biopolitical formula, sovereign life–death here makes live and makes die, forever sacrificing—Medea-like—its offspring (Moby-Dick, 467). For the individual, in sum, the dividend of being “merged in a joint stock company” is “disaster and death,” which means that corporate immortality is personal lethality made fungible (Moby-Dick, 320).28 “Heed it well, ye Pantheists!” (Moby-Dick, 159).29
And as the woebegone drowned plaintively testify, even death offers no respite from such a dreadfully impersonal life. Whereas resurrection typically was depicted in mid-nineteenth-century America as salvific—or at least final, eschatological—Melville’s resurrections are a Great Disappointment, a mere repetition or continuance of the animated lifelessness of the living.30 As such, they are all-too-earthly matters, though still horrible for all their mundanity: “an arm thrust forth from the grass over a grave”; “a knocking in a tomb”; a husband, “lock-jawed in grim death,” “softly clasp[ing] his bride”; and “grave-yards, cemeteries, and family vaults of creation yielding up the live bodies of all . . . men, women, and children” (Moby-Dick, 343, 37; “The Encantadas,” 797; Moby-Dick, 462).31 Recall, too, the cursed, transmigrated tortoises plodding their earthbound infinities, presaging and furthering Ahab’s own drawn-out demising. In each case, when “the ghost is spouted up,” the dead do not stay in “clean tabernacles of the soul” but are bodily reanimated “to fight” once more “and go through young life’s old routine again” (Moby-Dick, 429). “Pontoosuc” rehearses a similar idea: “Wane and wax, wax and wane: / Over and over and over amain; / End, ever end, and begin again— / End, ever end, and forever and ever begin again!”32 Although confirming that death is not the end, these images of life’s perpetual recycling offer little comfort. Drawing on an old nautical meaning of “amain,” they solicit surrender rather than triumph, imprisoning monotony rather than liberating novelty. These are less pictures of a heavenly renaissance than of a baroque, soul-annihilating recursivity that fetters living and dead in a perpetual, singsong restlessness. In this sense Ahab’s question “Where lies the final harbor, whence we unmoor no more?” is not defiant but beseeching (Moby-Dick, 492), and it finds its corollary in the concluding lines of Melville’s unfinished fragment “Rammon”: after considering an “unescapable life indefinitely continuous after death,” the protagonist wonders, who “would life renew?”33 The tragic answer, of course, is that we can’t go on but will go on. Far from a final rest, death is the ceaseless exhaustion of life. “But this is man-killing! Yet this is life. . . . Oh! the metempsychosis!” (Moby-Dick, 429).
This man-killing, tortoise-spawning metempsychosis returns us once more to Ahab. “Grand, ungodly, god-like” Ahab, indifferent and independent, might initially seem a singular exception to life’s departicularizing force (Moby-Dick, 79). For much of the novel he appears uniquely vital, all the more so because he acts like a proxy of life itself, “overmann[ing]” subordinate lives with the power of his magnetic will (“a certain magnetism shot into their congenial hearts from inflexible Ahab’s”); his mastery is so complete, in fact, as to assimilate their partial existences into his leviathan person: “Ye are not other men, but my arms and my legs; and so obey me” (Moby-Dick, 169, 518, 568). Ahab would thus appear to oppose the “unconditional, unintegral mastery” of the “personified impersonal” with the overawing dominance of his “personality” (Moby-Dick, 507).
We have already seen, however, how his corporeal form amalgamates life and death, and his famously vital constitution is federated too. As in body, so in soul is Ahab a heterogeneity. His animated will may have the power to “revolve” the crews’ “various wheels,” for instance, but it, too, is made up of various inanimates (a “cogged circle,” “an electric thing,” a “Leyden jar,” a “magnet”); his supposedly exceptional life is thus only a circuit of living–dead things (note “the mechanical humming of the wheels of his vitality” [Moby-Dick, 168, 166, 165, 212, 162]). His vaunted personality is, at last, only an impersonation, for what he tells the Manxman holds equally true of himself: “Life holds thee; not thou it” (Moby-Dick, 521). So is Ahab—idolatrous, evil king—dethroned and subjected like all the rest: “That before living agent, now became the living instrument” (Moby-Dick, 185). What function can “living” here serve except as a cruel irony? To repeat “living” in this manner, to attach it to “agent” and “instrument” alike, is, on the one hand, to universalize “life” and, on the other, to strip it of all meaning and consequence. To be a living instrument is to be dead to oneself.
Ahab’s lack of a personal life is most evident, however, in the bedroom. Although Moby-Dick frequently compares sleep to death, Ahab’s sleepwalking scene in Chapter 44, “The Chart,” best illustrates the enervating concomitance of life and death that I have been arguing defines Melville’s piebald metaphysics. In the famously dense passage, Ahab “burst from [his hammock] in horror” but not as the same Ahab “that had gone to” bed; it is, instead, “the eternal, living principle or soul in him,” now “disassociated from [his] characterizing mind” and seeking “escape from the scorching contiguity of the frantic thing, of which, for the time, it was no longer an integral” (Moby-Dick, 202). The context indicates that this “eternal, living principle” or “common vitality” is akin to Aristotle’s animal soul, an impersonal, uncharacterized function that animates all mobile life (Moby-Dick, 202). Sleepwalking Ahab “rush[ing] from his room,” therefore, is only “what seemed Ahab” (emphasis added); in reality, it is “but a vacated thing, a formless somnambulistic being, a ray of living light, to be sure, but without an object to color, and therefore a blankness in itself” (Moby-Dick, 202). And what it flees in horror isn’t exactly “Ahab” but, in what perhaps amounts to the same thing, the “frantic thing” that Ahab’s obsession with the white whale has produced: “a kind of self-assumed, independent being” that “could grimly live and burn” after its unnatural, “unfathered birth” (Moby-Dick, 202). As Ishmael laments, “God help thee, old man, thy thoughts have created a creature in thee; and he whose intense thinking thus makes him a Prometheus; a vulture feeds upon that heart for ever; that vulture the very creature he creates” (Moby-Dick, 202).
In ascribing such a classically tragic fate to Ahab’s monomania, the scene appears to draw a stark contrast between the common “living principle” found in all that lives and the uniquely parthenogenetic, Frankensteinian “creature” birthed by his madness. Freighted with signifiers implying the naturalness of the former and the abnormality of the latter, the opposition is, by all indications, absolute. What is fascinating about this dichotomy, however, is that it both proliferates and implodes, scrambling the very distinctions on which it seems to insist. After all, both body–soul and thought–creature are “unbidden,” “independent beings” that escape Ahab’s control; on both fronts, that which seems most personal, most internal, disintegrates into the impersonal (“no longer an integral”), departicularized within the acidic “morbidness at the bottom of his nature” (Moby-Dick, 74).34 Neither synonymous with nor separable from “Ahab,” these two nonidentities simultaneously empty and overpopulate his (and yet not his) being. Furthermore, despite “the vacated thing[’s]” “horror” regarding “the frantic thing,” both are things, monstrous forms of impossible life.
The autophagic vulture’s monstrousness is self-evident, but that of the body–soul may be more elusive. To see it, we must recognize not only the resemblances among the “vacated . . . somnambulistic being,” the previously discussed dead-yet-lethal sharks, and Melville’s many reanimated corpses but also the connection between the “blankness in itself” of the “ray of living light . . . without an object to color” and the whiteness of the whale from two chapters prior—the “colorless, all-color of atheism” that, while “remain[ing] white or colorless in itself . . . [when] operating without medium,” obscures with its “mystical cosmetic” both Nature’s “charnel-house” and the universe’s leprosy (Moby-Dick, 195). We can only conclude from this uncanny recurrence that life-as-such or life-in-itself—“living light”—is, for Melville, death incarnate, a “darkness leaping out of light,” a “blank tinge” that briefly veils corpses with ironic “life” (Moby-Dick, 507, 195). Buried within all his rose-colored vitalities is “the pallor of the dead,” the “milk-white” “ghos[t]” of a dispossessed life that haunts all being (Moby-Dick, 192). This is “the insanity of life” (Moby-Dick, 151).
•••
What are we to make of a life that is not what we make of it? In the preceding pages, I have sought to isolate in Melville’s work an inhuman, impersonal life–death—the unrecognizable and formless outside that is also encrypted within (Branka Arsić, in a different register, names this the “impersonal beyond the difference between death and life”).35 In closing, I want to suggest that this mid-nineteenth-century after-life might preemptively bury some of our recent attempts to revitalize both philosophy and ourselves; from the grave, as it were, Melville’s “arm thrust[s] forth” and pulls us down.
Consider, in this respect, the panoply of contemporary theories that attempt to find in “the precarious, accidental, contingent, expedient, striving, dynamic status of life” a blueprint for “political and cultural struggles.”36 Whether neovitalist, new materialist, new animist, or affirmatively biopolitical, these approaches reject prior “equat[ions] [of] biologism and naturalism with a conservative agenda” in order to articulate progressive “biocentered egalitarianism[s]” and “alternative ecologies of belonging” based on a redistributive “politics of ‘life itself.’”37 Despite these discourses’ many theoretical differences, what unites them is the conviction that biological “life”—a principle or essence assumed to be inherent to all beings—is both real and redemptive. They then divine in life’s supposed production of both interdependence and “endless variation” a “capacity for the eruption of collective life, and for the creation of . . . new modes of living.”38 If necro- and thanatopolitics are versions of biopolitics predicated on racializing and then eliminating, in the name of life as such, any population’s perceived deficiency or abnormality, then these new theories envision an “alterbiopolitics” in which life’s true, democratic nature is harnessed to counter biopower’s unjust, unequal securitization of the living.39 Thus, while many of these theories concede that life is ultimately nonhuman and ends in death, they nevertheless emphasize its positive potentialities and lively agencies, converting even its inhumanity into an opportunity for antiracist, antisexist, and antianthropocentric networks of existence. Indeed, death itself is transmuted into a necessary motor of life’s advance.40 Some prominent Melville scholarship of the past few years partakes of this life-based faith, including Geoffrey Sanborn’s description of an ethos of more-than-human “fellowship” in the author’s work, Michael Jonik’s contention that “Melville’s characters . . . explicate a nonanthropocentric relational thinking,” and Donald E. Pease’s location of “an alternative biopolitical order” in Melville’s outlining of “a non-capitalist commonality between men.”41
The rejection of “life’s” instrumentalization for regressive ends is, of course, both admirable and necessary. Reassembling “life” for positive ethicopolitical outcomes, however, falls into the same mistake: assuming that a bio-ontology has a necessary relation to the way we conduct our lives; both past and present life-philosophies convert life’s perceived norms into social and personal imperatives. Noting life’s indeterminacy is unobjectionable. Building a prescriptive worldview on it is, I believe, both logically and historically suspect. This is where Melville’s “after-life” is useful. Not only does it evidence the difficulty of defining “life,” but it also, and more important, demonstrates the latent horror of a life made sovereign over the living. Against optimistic and even utopian accounts of life, old and new, Melville’s life–death is less sanguine because more crimson—or, what’s worse, more pallid, “blanched to a corpse’s hue” (Moby-Dick, 545). While Melville would agree with new materialism that something approximating life is everywhere, and though he, like neovitalism, pictures life’s immanent power, he does not therefore conclude that life overrules death or that it has the capacity to liberate, redeem, or revive us. Quite the opposite. In the place of theory’s valorizations of life’s salvific agency, activity, and generativity, Melville pictures life’s ruins, immolations, and passivities—“the hideous rot of life” (Moby-Dick, 485). Such an after-life doesn’t save us; it buries us alive. Indeed, by interinterring life and death (and we between them), Melville forecloses their religious, political, and intellectual domestication; the after-life, for him, bereaves rather than bequeaths. Melville thus prefigures not only Arsić’s “lifeless life” (“it negates life absolutely”) but also Timothy Morton’s “spectral life” (“as . . . the life–nonlife boundary collapse[s], more and more specters emerge”), Eugene Thacker’s Schopenhauerian “darklife” (“life [that] is defined by the negation of life”), as well as what might be characterized more generally as an incipient against-life recoil.42 In opposing the optimistic and romantic life-philosophies of his age, Melville’s work offers a resource for such contestations of our own current culture of life.
Melville’s ultimate figures for this paradoxical, self-canceling after-life, ones that he revisits repeatedly, are memento mori. Fittingly, both Moby-Dick and “The Encantadas” begin and end with them, and with them I, too, will conclude. Moby-Dick opens, Poe-like, with the “Late . . . Usher”—a remembrance of death twice over—“remind[ing] him[self] of his mortality,” and it closes with Ishmael’s memory of his “life-buoy of a coffin,” a reminder that even though he has once more survived himself, his is a death-borne life (Moby-Dick, xv, 525). In “The Encantadas,” the aforementioned epigraph to the first sketch conjures “greedy grave[s]” and “wandring ghosts,” and the final words of the last sketch belong to one of the island’s grave board epitaphs: “Oh, Brother Jack, as you pass by, / As you are now, so once was I” (“The Encantadas,” 764, 818). Between the two is a vision that haunts the narrator “in scenes of social merriment”: “I have seemed to see . . . heavily crawling along the floor, the ghost of a gigantic tortoise, with ‘Memento * * * * *’ burning in live letters upon his back” (“The Encantadas,” 768). The tones and contexts of these examples vary widely, but animating them all is not only a clichéd injunction to remember death in life but also an insistence that death is already present in life, coexisting with it, even if we only see its X’d out traces (how could death be remembered if we weren’t already intimates?). The usher, the coffin, the two graves, and the tortoise: all embody a fundamental breach of death into life, a universal irruption made possible only because death is livelier—and life deadlier—than we suspected. The dead are life’s haunts; the dead are, life haunts. The effect of this chiastic, living-dead ontology, according to Melville, is our spectralization: we become our own ghosts, our selves’ apparitions, as our lives both never were and continue after their seeming deaths. Thus can Ahab—forever dying while “living”—become a living-fossil tortoise upon “death”: when we “die,” we are born not into glory but into more of the same, which means that life is only death’s reproduction. We the living are “Death’s open secret.”43 We, memento mori.
Mortifying though they may be, however, Melville refuses to moralize his memento mori; unlike traditional examples that aim to solicit humility or sanctity, Melville’s specimens testify only to an indifference that withers any attempt at instrumentalization or edification. Like the life–death they incarnate, they usher but do not guide; they pilot without horizon or shore. What have revenants to do with arrivals? Against any effort to find in life a vitalizing rebirth, Melville delivers an after-life in which the world is a dead letter office and we the messages lost in the sending. “Is then life worth living?”44 It is a dead question; life is both unlivable and “unescapable.”45 What remains—to and of us—is only a spectral aesthetics, as we forever spectate a passing that both is and isn’t our own. “Methinks it pictures life”: from memento mori to Ars moriendi (Moby-Dick, 170).
1. Melville establishes the connection between harpoon lines and umbilical cords in Chapter 87, “The Grand Armada”: “As when the stricken whale . . . has reeled out hundreds of fathoms of rope . . . so now, Starbuck saw long coils of the umbilical cord of Madame Leviathan, by which the young cub seemed still tethered to its dam.” Herman Melville, Moby-Dick, ed. Harrison Hayford, Hershel Parker, and G. Thomas Tanselle (Evanston: Northwestern University Press; Chicago: Newberry Library, 1988), 388. Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text.
2. Herman Melville, “The Encantadas, or Enchanted Isles. By Salvator R. Tarnmoor,” in Pierre, Israel Potter, The Piazza Tales, The Confidence Man, Uncollected Prose, Billy Budd, Sailor (New York: Library of America, 1984), 767–68, 814. Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text. Moby-Dick also references “guilty beings transformed into . . . fowls and . . . fish” that “seem condemned to swim on everlastingly without any haven in store” (193–94).
3. Herman Melville, “Rammon,” in Billy Budd, Sailor, and Other Uncompleted Writings, ed. Harrison Hayford et al. (Evanston: Northwestern University Press; Chicago: Newberry Library, 2017), 227.
4. Consider Ahab’s surmise that between the joys of life and the “griefs [of] the grave,” “there . . . seems an inequality in the deeper analysis of the thing” (Moby-Dick, 464). Paul Hurh observes something similar in Clarel: the “periodicity in Melville’s scheme suggests a repetitious time, yet one that pessimistically focuses on the perishing rather than the coming-to-be.” Hurh, “Clarel, Doubt, Delay,” in Melville’s Philosophies, ed. Branka Arsić and K. L. Evans (New York: Bloomsbury, 2017), 93.
5. Herman Melville, “Pontoosuc,” in Billy Budd, Sailor, and Other Uncompleted Writings, 290, lines 93–94.
6. Robert Zoellner’s The Salt-Sea Mastodon (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973) contends that Moby-Dick elevates Ishmael’s worldview of cyclical rebirth over Ahab’s “entropic decay” (196). I argue instead that the novel pictures a paradoxical ontology of never-ending, self-consuming decay.
7. See, for instance, Tyrus Hillway, “Melville’s Education in Science,” Texas Studies in Literature and Language 16, no. 3 (Fall 1974): 411–25; Eric Wilson, “Melville, Darwin, and the Great Chain of Being,” Studies in American Fiction 28, no. 2 (Autumn 2000): 131–50; Jill Barnum, “Melville, Lorenz Oken, and Biology: Engaging the ‘Long Now,’” Leviathan 7, no. 2 (October 2005): 41–46; James Duban, “‘Visible Objects of Reverence’: Quotations from Goethe in Melville’s Annotated New Testament,” Leviathan 9, no. 2 (June 2007): 3–23; Wyn Kelley, “Rozoko in the Pacific: Melville’s Natural History of Creation,” in “Whole Oceans Away”: Melville and the Pacific, ed. Jill Barnum, Wyn Kelley, and Christopher Sten (Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 2007), 139–52; Jennifer J. Baker, “Dead Bones and Honest Wonders: The Aesthetics of Natural Science in Moby-Dick,” in Melville and Aesthetics, ed. Samuel Otter and Geoffrey Sanborn (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 85–101; Karen Lentz Madison and R. D. Madison, “Darwin’s Year and Melville’s ‘New Ancient of Days,’” in America’s Darwin: Darwinian Theory and U.S. Literary Culture, ed. Tina Gianquitto and Lydia Fisher (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2014), 86–103; Eileen McGinnis, “‘Change Irreverent’: Evolution and Faith in ‘The Encantadas’ and Clarel,” in Visionary of the Word: Melville and Religion, ed. Jonathan A. Cook and Brian Yothers (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2017), 71–96; and Richard J. King, Ahab’s Rolling Sea: A Natural History of “Moby-Dick” (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2019).
8. On the shift from cataloging living things to attempting to isolate the nature and meaning of life-in-itself (the defining move of modern biology), see Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (New York: Vintage, 1994).
9. Although space precludes a full discussion of the salient differences among and within new materialism, neovitalism, and affirmative biopolitics, I do not wish to suggest that they are synonymous or even self-identical; in fact, new materialisms often aren’t explicitly biologically oriented at all, as evidenced by Karen Barad’s quantum mechanical model. I mean only to note their common reliance on “life” as a basis, first, for characterizing the fundamental nature of activity and being as such; second, for valuing that nature; and, third, for altering existing conditions in this value’s name.
10. See Achille Mbembe’s seminal analysis of the ways in which slavery and colonialism produced “a form of death in life.” Mbembe, “Necropolitics,” trans. Libby Meintjes, in Biopolitics: A Reader, ed. Timothy Campbell and Adam Sitze (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2013), 170.
11. It should be noted that the mere recognition of life has never guaranteed protection from harm and, in some cases, has furthered it. I explore this and other problems with past and present life philosophies at greater length in “Life’s Returns: Hylozoism, Again,” PMLA 135, no. 3 (May 2020): 474–91.
12. Melville, “Pontoosuc,” 279, line 34; Herman Melville, “The Lightning-Rod Man,” in Pierre, Israel Potter, The Piazza Tales, The Confidence Man, Uncollected Prose, Billy Budd, Sailor, 762.
13. For Melville’s visit to the Galápagos Islands and how it informed “The Encantadas,” see Hershel Parker, Herman Melville: A Biography, vol. 1 (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), 200–202, 204. Although it is beyond the scope of this essay, I see the repeated citations of The Faerie Queene in “The Encantadas” as indicating Melville’s exploration of what might be called, in a linguistic register, the irrealis mood of the islands, of its ghostly inhabitants, and of the text itself; all appear as if alive.
14. See Jacques Derrida, Cinders (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014). See also Francisco Vitale’s discussion of Derrida’s refusal of the conventional life–death dialectic (which subsumes death within life) in favor of the neologism “life death.” Vitale, Biodeconstruction: Jacques Derrida and the Life Sciences, trans. Mauro Senatore (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2018), 33.
15. Herman Melville, “The New Ancient of Days: The Man of the Cave of Engihoul (See Lyell’s Antiquity of Man and Darwin’s Descent of Species),” in Billy Budd, Sailor, and Other Uncompleted Writings, 275, line 55.
16. Charles Darwin, The Voyage of the Beagle (1845 ed.), in From So Simple a Beginning: The Four Great Books of Charles Darwin, ed. Edward O. Wilson (New York: W. W. Norton, 2006), 326. For Melville’s reading of and complicated relation to Darwin’s work while he composed “The Encantadas,” see Richard Dean Smith, Melville’s Science: “Devilish Tantalization of the Gods!” (New York: Garland, 1993), 87, 89, 106, 206; and Eric Wilson, Romantic Turbulence: Chaos, Ecology, and American Space (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000), 72, 85.
17. See also the narrator’s claim that the tortoises “craw[l] so slowly and ponderously, that not only did toad-stools and all fungus things grow beneath their feet, but a sooty moss sprouted upon their backs” (772).
18. Sharon Cameron, Impersonality: Seven Essays (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), ix.
19. Consider, for instance, Queequeg’s “head . . . look[ing] for all the world like a mildewed skull” or the comparison in Chapter 119, “The Candles,” of Pequod crew members to “the standing, or stepping, or running skeletons in Herculaneum,” a Pompeii-like site where people were frozen by a pyroclastic flow into a grisly tableau vivant (Moby-Dick, 21, 507).
20. Melville, quoted in Branka Arsić, Passive Constitutions; or, 7 1/2 Times Bartleby (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007), 131.
21. Herman Melville, “The Continents,” in Billy Budd, Sailor, and Other Uncompleted Writings, 251.
22. Interestingly, Melville casts “life” in the feminine role of “wife,” which in the history of biology would have signified that life was the passive, lesser partner (and death the active, inseminating agent) in this reproduction. See, for instance, Aristotle’s “Generation of Animals,” in The Complete Works of Aristotle, The Revised Oxford Translation, 2 vols., ed. Jonathan Barnes (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984), 1: 1132.
23. For a more optimistic reading that identifies in the figure of riotocracy an “emancipatory potential for new modes of being-with,” see Michael Jonik’s Herman Melville and the Politics of the Inhuman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 140.
24. See Colin Dayan’s discussion of the “cycles of predation” that trouble the “boundaries between human and nonhuman.” Dayan, “Melville’s Creatures; or, Seeing Otherwise,” in American Impersonal: Essays with Sharon Cameron, ed. Branka Arsić (New York: Bloomsbury, 2014), 46.
25. Consider, too, that the narrator of “The Encantadas” ultimately eats one of the tortoises he had previously identified with both deceased sailors and himself (772). This echoes Arthur Schopenhauer’s diagnosis that “the will-to-live generally feasts on itself.” Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, 2 vols., trans. E. F. J. Payne (New York: Dover, 1969), 1: 147.
26. As Melville puts it in “Pontoosuc”: “And present Nature as a moss doth show / On the ruins of the Nature of aeons of long ago” (279, lines 57–58).
27. See Richard Hardack, “Not Altogether Human”: Pantheism and the Dark Nature of the American Renaissance (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2012).
28. For a different interpretation of Melville’s dissolution of discrete, bounded characters via an impersonal, “lavish vitality,” see Michael D. Snediker, “Melville and Queerness without Character,” in The New Cambridge Companion to Herman Melville, ed. Robert S. Levine (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 156.
29. As Sharon Cameron and Branka Arsić have established, Melville doubles down on this perspective by intimating that even while alive as putative individuals, we live an impersonal life (and thus are dead to ourselves); dead or alive, we are puppeted by a garroting vitality, our deindividualization having begun before birth. See, for instance, Cameron, Impersonality, ix, xiii; and Arsić, Passive Constitutions, 5, 89.
30. Regarding the Millerite prophecy that Jesus Christ would return on October 22, 1844—later known as the Great Disappointment when it did not come to pass—see Ronald L. Numbers and Jonathan M. Butler, eds., The Disappointed: Millerism and Millenarianism in the Nineteenth Century (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1993).
31. Timothy Marr reads the blank scroll and ivy vines adorning Melville’s own tombstone as testifying to an optimistic, post-Christian faith in “the generation that emerges out of annihilation.” Marr, “Melville’s Planetary Compass,” in The New Cambridge Companion to Herman Melville, 200. I read them as inscribing the inverse: the blank annihilation that results from an impersonal, necrophagic life. Both interpretations are no doubt partly true, but I believe their synthesis points to a finally pessimistic account of life’s bankrupt perpetuity.
32. Melville, “Pontoosuc,” 280, lines 78–81.
33. Melville, “Rammon,” 228, 230.
34. Ahab’s “mortal greatness,” in other words, “is but disease,” which means that his so-called life is both deadly and not his own (Moby-Dick, 74).
35. Arsić, Passive Constitutions, 107.
36. Elizabeth Grosz, The Nick of Time: Politics, Evolution, and the Untimely (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2004), 2, 14.
37. Vicki Kirby, “Foreword,” in What If Culture Was Nature All Along? ed. Vicki Kirby (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2017), x; Rosa Braidotti, “The Politics of ‘Life Itself’ and New Ways of Dying,” in New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency, and Politics, ed. Diana Coole and Samantha Frost (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2010), 204.
38. Elizabeth Grosz, Becoming Undone: Darwinian Reflections on Life, Politics, and Art (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2011), 3, 8.
39. María Puig de la Bellacasa, Matters of Care: Speculative Ethics in More Than Human Worlds (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017), 164.
40. See Rosa Braidotti, The Posthuman (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2013), 134; and Peta Hinton’s criticism of Braidotti in “A Sociality of Death: Towards a New Materialist Politics and Ethics of Life Itself,” in Kirby, What If Culture Was Nature All Along?, 223–47.
41. Geoffrey Sanborn, “Melville and the Nonhuman World,” in Levine, The New Cambridge Companion to Herman Melville, 11; Jonik, Melville and the Politics of the Inhuman, 19; and Donald E. Pease, “From the Camp to the Commons: Biopolitical Alter-Geographies in Douglass and Melville,” Arizona Quarterly: A Journal of American Literature, Culture, and Theory 72, no. 3 (Autumn 2016): 21, 20. All three authors take pains to note the ways in which an expanded conception of “life” need not result in positive outcomes, but all three also imply that the potential solutions to such problems lie in life itself (or in Melville’s conception of it).
42. Arsić, Passive Constitutions, 120, 126; Timothy Morton, “Spectral Life: The Uncanny Valley Is in Fact a Gigantic Plain, Stretching as Far as the Eye Can See in Every Direction,” in Posthumous Life: Theorizing Beyond the Posthuman, ed. Jami Weinstein and Claire Colebrook (New York: Columbia University Press, 2017), 280; and Eugene Thacker, “Darklife: Negation, Nothingness, and the Will-to-Life in Schopenhauer,” in Weinstein and Colebrook, Posthumous Life, 312. See also Alastair Hunt and Stephanie Youngblood, eds., Against Life (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2016).
43. Herman Melville, “Under the Rose (Being an Extract from an Old M.S. Entitled Travels in Persia by a Servant to My Lord the Ambassador),” in Billy Budd, Sailor, and Other Uncompleted Writings, 239.
44. Herman Melville, “Profundity and Levity,” in Billy Budd, Sailor, and Other Uncompleted Writings, 99.
45. Melville, “Rammon,” 228.