Samuel Otter
In the outstanding introductory essay to this volume, Meredith Farmer is careful not to align the diverse materialisms of her contributors with any specific approach. Instead, she and her coeditor Jonathan D. S. Schroeder welcome a broad “materialist turn” in recent criticism that displaces human beings from the center of interest and takes up the matter shared by humans and the broader world in all its various forms.
How might we gauge the “materialist turn”? One way would be to consider Diana Coole and Samantha Frost’s introduction to their interdisciplinary anthology New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency, and Politics (2010). I take the adjective “new” in Coole and Frost’s title to signify recent developments rather than to profess allegiance to a particular stance. Like Farmer and Schroeder, they seek to identify the conceptual investments shared across a plurality of approaches. The political scientists Coole and Frost link materialist arguments to twentieth-century developments in the natural sciences, especially physics and biology, that transformed the classical scientific understanding of matter as inert and calculable. These new understandings of matter emphasized forces, energies, and intensities, and they attended to intricate and even aleatory processes, thus displacing teleological models of cause and effect. Many materialists draw on alternative philosophical genealogies—for example, the atomism of Lucretius and the nondualism of Spinoza, rather than the corpuscles of Descartes and his elevation of mind over matter. Materialist claims are often aligned with recent critical theory, especially the corporeal genealogy of Michel Foucault, the ideological state apparatuses of Louis Althusser, the expanded concept of agency in Bruno Latour, the vitalism of Gilles Deleuze, and the posthumanism of Giorgio Agamben.1
Coole and Frost describe how materialists question the privileging of human cognition and semiosis and the distinctiveness of human subjectivity and agency. Altering the hierarchy of subject over object, they consider the vitality, impact, and political consequences of matter broadly defined: not only the bodies of humans and animals but also the range of matter typically considered to be inanimate and subordinate to human life. Less skeptical about reality and more alert to the resilience of matter than theorists of social construction, such materialists offer an alternative to what Coole and Frost view as the diminishing returns of twentieth-century linguistic and cultural demystification, the “hermeneutics of suspicion” pilloried recently by Rita Felski and others. Materialists seek to offer a different conceptual and tonal approach, revitalizing critical analysis.
Another way of gauging the “materialist turn” would be to consider the political theorist Jane Bennett’s influential Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (2009), the theoretical work most frequently cited by the contributors to Ahab Unbound. With calibrated hyperbole, Bennett rejects anthropomorphism and insists on a “vital materiality”: “the capacity of things—edibles, commodities, storms, metals—not only to impede or block the will and designs of humans but also to act as quasi agents or forces with trajectories, propensities, or tendencies of their own.” She hopes that this philosophical reorientation will yield political consequences, furthering a noninstrumental understanding of matter, a greater attentiveness to things and their capacities for action and response, a less destructive relationship between human beings and the world they share, and a democracy that is not partitioned into speaking subjects and mute objects. The literary critic Amanda Jo Goldstein, arguing for the materialist ontology of British Romantic writers, describes how they “cast life as dependent upon context, contact, and combination: a contingent susceptibility rather than an autonomous power.” Bennett and Goldstein together show how a regard for detail that we might consider a distinguishing feature of literary sensibility can be aligned with the hope of transformed political affects and arrangements. In Vibrant Matter, Bennett writes that she learned styles of responsiveness and reciprocity from writers such as Henry David Thoreau, Walt Whitman, and Franz Kafka.2
Or we might assess the critique of recent materialisms put forward by the literary critic Benjamin Boysen, who diagnoses in thinkers such as Bennett a “semiophobia,” a misguided effort to avoid or downplay the importance of human consciousness and the human use of signs and symbols. In his view, materialists offer instead a monism in which agency is scattered among entities and things, distinctions between subjects and objects are abandoned, and we are left with a “quasi-religious animism” that avoids negativity and risks political quietism. He argues that the emphasis on human consciousness can be questioned without jettisoning salient differences between the human and the nonhuman or the value of semiosis for human reality.3 In Ahab Unbound, Donald E. Pease offers an interpretation of Moby-Dick, especially Chapter 36, “The Quarter-Deck,” that responds to such complaints (invoking not Boysen but Eric L. Santner). Pease’s argument serves as a template for bringing together the new materialism of “vibrant matter” and the traditional historical or dialectical materialisms that have analyzed the bases for human social conflict. Questions of agency in a materialist world are confronted across Ahab Unbound. Bennett’s ontology is not as flat as Boysen claims, and his charges of political irresponsibility seem misplaced, but in responding to the essays in this volume, I too will raise some questions about the unsettling of distinctions and the status of language.
What is materialism as applied to literary texts? Farmer’s introductory essay and the subsequent essays, impressive in their range and insight, provide many answers. Several of the contributors take up materialist theory in detail, but most of the writers register its effects in the textures and touchstones of their arguments about the materialist tendencies in Melville’s writings, often but not exclusively focusing on the character of Ahab. Editing this volume, Farmer and Schroeder have divided the sixteen essays into four parts titled “Ontologies,” “Relations,” “Politics,” and “New Melvilles.” One of the pleasures and challenges of such a rich volume involves tracing the complex relationships among its parts. Let me venture a somewhat different arrangement, not as a substitute for the intricate sequence that Farmer outlines, but as another perspective on the relays among the essays in which additional categories have salience.
Branka Arsić argues that Melville, drawing on traditions of Western idealism and on the natural history of Buffon, represents Ahab as envisioning a bodiless existence liberated from all constraining form. The narrator Ishmael is tempted by this fantasy but ultimately diverges from it. Invoking the cetology of John Hunter and Thomas Beale, Melville portrays an Ishmael who, in his encounters with and speculations about whales, imagines a different relation to the world, one in which bodies are porous, flexible assemblages. Life and thought flow into and out of their surroundings. Bonnie Honig analyzes the synesthetic qualities of the whale flesh in Moby-Dick, particularly the change of state from solid to liquid to aroma in Chapter 94, “A Squeeze of the Hand,” as the sailors communally manipulate spermaceti and inhale its substance. In this scene of metamorphosis and inspiration, she envisions a transformed democratic order: intimate, contingent, productively volatile. This alternative to the capitalist division between head and hand contrasts with the other arrangements on display in the book—the political theology of Ahab and the political economy of Starbuck—and with the account of sovereignty in Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan. Jonathan Lamb considers the literary effects of the maritime diets that impaired the bodies and minds of sailors. He introduces landlocked twenty-first-century readers to three types of fantasy acknowledged in the late-eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as resulting from the deficiency of vitamin C, fantasies that focused on hunger, nostalgia, and calenture (a fevered view of the sea as land). Discussing Typee (1846), Omoo (1847), and Moby-Dick (1851), Lamb details the ways in which Melville represents his characters as physically altered by their diets and affected by scorbutic fantasies, with Ahab, aware of his infirmity, using his symptoms to maintain sway over his crew. Jonathan Schroeder returns to nineteenth-century definitions of “monomania” to explain how Ahab’s fixation is tied to ethnicity and geography. Schroeder points to the similarities between medical and ethnological understandings of monomania, in which natal environments rendered certain populations especially susceptible to emotionalism and estrangement, and he argues that Melville turned Ahab into a vivid example of white ethnicity—in extremis at sea—at the time when such formations were being generated across a range of discourses.
Christopher P. Haines links the neuroscientific philosophy of Catherine Malabou with Melville’s palpable figurations of thought in the 1850s, specifically his portrayal of Ahab’s firmly held convictions. Haines shows how both Melville and Malabou delve into the materiality of the brain’s operations and consider its porousness, vulnerability, and audacity. He argues that Melville and Malabou not only question the centrality of the human subject and unsettle the hierarchies between humans and the material world but also emphasize the porousness between subjects and environments. Pilar Martínez Benedí and Ralph Savarese call for a more sympathetic approach to Ahab, offering the thought experiment of a hypothetical twenty-first-century diagnosis of mirror-touch synesthesia, a condition in which individuals experience a corresponding sensation in the same part of the body that another person feels. Such experiences can result in overwhelming emotional, rather than cognitive, empathy with the sensations of others. We might understand Ahab, with his missing limb and passionate excess (“but Ahab never thinks; he only feels, feels, feels; that’s tingling enough for mortal man,” the captain announces at the beginning of Chapter 135, “The Chase—Third Day”), not as icily detached from others but as exorbitantly connected to them, and we might consider his social withdrawal as a response to this sensory overload. Russell Sbriglia shifts theoretical attention from Ahab’s missing leg (the crux for psychoanalytical exegeses of his castration anxieties) to the ivory leg that replaces it. For Sbriglia, Ahab’s prosthesis is an instance of Bennett’s “vibrant matter,” possessing agency and affect not bound to the human, but it is more fully understood as an example of Jacques Lacan’s Master Signifier: a phallic substitute for absence. Ahab is not, as some materialists would have it, the paradigmatic human subject unraveled. Instead, in his regal emptiness and his subjection to the unconscious, he is the epitome of subjectivity. Ivy Wilson analyzes the system of transnational capitalism, pivoting on abstraction and objectification, that hinges the two parts of “The Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids” (1855), across which Melville connects leisured English gentlemen with laboring New England factory women. Wilson argues that these paired sketches expose the contradictions of nation, class, gender, and race that enable the system to function.
Christopher Castiglia links the conditions of Ahab (his lost leg) and Ishmael (his depression), recasting Moby-Dick as a twofold story about disability told by a disabled narrator. Castiglia reminds us that the Ahab we receive on the pages of the book is Ishmael’s version. He considers Ishmael’s extravagant rhetorical evasions to be not only a symptom of his reluctance to come to terms with Ahab’s situation and his own but also one of the aesthetic achievements of the book. In the narrator’s equivocation and humor, Castiglia also discerns Melville’s efforts to articulate a compassion that is mutual but not reductive or objectifying. Colin Dayan analyzes how Melville’s prose in Israel Potter (1854) is shaped by his fascination with metamorphosis, his refusal of taxonomy, and his obsession with remnants and excrescences. She dwells on the similes in Israel Potter that materialize, conflate, entomb, and resuscitate their terms, depicting human subjectivity as intimately merged with the nonhuman world. Michael D. Snediker considers the figurative materiality of pain, looking at the way Melville’s verbal extravagance in Moby-Dick conveys the experience and the effects of chronic suffering. In Melville’s sentences, the self becomes newly aware of and alienated from itself through depletion and seepage. Both Snediker and Castiglia integrate verbal analysis, bodily inquiry, and autobiographical reflection.
Steve Mentz invokes the long-standing critical practice of dividing the main characters Ishmael and Ahab in Moby-Dick into contrasting Weltanschauungen (as do several others in this volume), while adding a materialist spin and a maritime register. He juxtaposes Ahab’s egotism and antagonism toward the ocean with Ishmael’s self-dispersal and affinity for the sea, and he envisions different paths in Queequeg’s utopian pluralism or Bulkington’s intense (and possibly fatal) relationship with the vast, restless, inhuman ocean. Mark Noble examines the gap between Melville’s depiction of Ahab’s fractured agency and the character’s fantasies of command, a gap that reveals Ahab’s illusory relationship to the economic system in which he is interpellated. Noble worries about those fantasies as the only diegetic alternative to Starbuck’s insistence on the primacy of capitalist relations, but he also lingers over the persistent allure, and possible value, of such yearnings for authority. Donald Pease revisits “The Quarter-Deck,” a pivotal chapter in which Ahab forges a new relationship with his crew. Pease revises his own earlier interpretation of Ahab as a dictator who bends the crew to his quest for vengeance and instead views the chapter as offering a different set of relations, a circulation of energies that Melville associates with electromagnetism. Melville stages not mastery and surrender but a political experiment: a “trial of force” (as Bruno Latour terms it) in which the captain and crew together affirm in their quest for Moby Dick a volatile substitute for the dominant economic and social contracts on board the Pequod. Matthew A. Taylor links Ahab with the giant tortoises of Melville’s “The Encantadas” (1854), nominating the creatures as the captain’s reptilian successors. He associates both with a materialist convergence of life and death and a regard for inhuman circulations. But he views Melville’s “sepulchritude”—his fascination with the terror and beauty of inexorable decay—as eschewing both the affirmations of nineteenth-century evolutionary theory and the political redemptions of twenty-first-century materialisms. John Modern invokes Wai Chee Dimock’s “theory of resonance” to plot the relationships among seemingly disparate elements: Melville’s chronicle of the whaling industry, the scholar Howard P. Vincent’s portrait of Melville’s source-laden writing techniques, Vincent’s Ohio basement filled with whaling artifacts, the 1930s critical turn from appreciating Ahab as a Romantic hero to envisioning him as a harbinger of the totalitarian personality, the deteriorating conditions for workers in the Akron tire industry in the mid-twentieth century, and songs by the Akron punk rock band Devo (who, we learn, rehearsed in Vincent’s basement in 1973). Modern traces a pattern of response across time and forms, seeing in Moby-Dick a grappling with the specter of technological development and determinism.
•••
Taken together, the essays in Ahab Unbound point up aspects of Melville’s thought and literary practice that have been insufficiently acknowledged, including his sustained interest in the nonhuman world and the fleshy complexity of its manifold creatures, the relationships between cognition and sensation, the dispersal of agency, subjectivities without borders, the palpability of thought, and the relationships between materiality, disability, and queerness. Objects take on new meanings, even lives of their own: the spermaceti in tubs on the decks of the Pequod, Ahab’s ivory leg, and the paraphernalia in Vincent’s Ohio basement. Moby-Dick becomes a vital part of materialist inquiries and reformulations.
Ahab Unbound will invigorate the study of Melville and materialism, expanding the range of theories and methods brought to an understanding of his career. As several of the contributors indicate, Melville’s interest in materialism predates Moby-Dick, in Typee and Omoo, and extends beyond Moby-Dick to “The Encantadas,” “The Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids,” and Israel Potter. Pierre (1852) would also seem ripe for materialist attention. (Think, for example, of the character Isabel whose consciousness develops “among the inhumanities.”) In Contingent Figure: Chronic Pain and Queer Embodiment (2021), Michael Snediker takes up the outlandish “strange eye-fish with wings” passage involving Pierre and Lucy in Book II, altering our understanding of its referents and its affinities (including to Plato and William Wordsworth). He delineates in Melville’s exorbitant prose a figurative texturing of pain that is unmoored from diegesis. Mardi (1849), too, would seem to be especially fertile ground for materialist approaches, having generated recent essays by Tom Nurmi on geology, mineralogy, and human ties to the earth and by Michael Jonik on Melville’s restaging of eighteenth-century materialist and idealist philosophies. In her forthcoming book on Melville, Branka Arsić interprets his portrayal of coral formations in Mardi as an alternative to construing living forms in terms of parts and wholes. Materialist concerns may revitalize scrutiny of this relatively overlooked early Melville text. The essays in Ahab Unbound will join these efforts, focus attention on the study of Melville and materialism, help define its contours, and spur readers and critics to reconsider the scope of his works.4
Recent scholarship on Melville and materialism rarely heeds the poetry that he wrote in the last three decades of his life. (Exceptions would include Jonik’s Melville and the Politics of the Inhuman and Arsić’s “Desertscapes: Geological Politics in Clarel.”)5 In Ahab Unbound, Melville’s poetry is mentioned only by Jonathan Lamb (the 1866 Battle-Pieces) and Michael Snediker (the 1876 Clarel). Such patterns of regard and neglect are illuminating, and they extend to individual works as well. The materialist analyses of Moby-Dick in this volume often adduce textual cruxes in passages from “The Quarter-Deck”; Chapter 44, “The Chart”; and “A Squeeze of the Hand,” while other pertinent chapters remain largely unaddressed, such as Chapter 85, “The Fountain.” In this chapter, Melville’s narrator ponders the matter of the whale’s spout and the substance of cetacean and human thought. My point about the inattention to Melville’s poems is not that they should have been of significant concern in a volume that emphasizes Moby-Dick or that every scholar should be a Melville completist—readers will make different judgments about the kinds of value they find in Melville’s poetry—but that the poems Melville wrote between 1866 and 1891 further his materialist inquiries. I have in mind, for example, the “scheme of Nature” in “The Conflict of Convictions” and the undeceiving bullet in “Shiloh” (Battle-Pieces); the geologist Margoth’s scientific (“old”) materialism, the debates about subjectivity, agency, temporality, and form, and the lethal vitality of stones and of deserts that resemble oceans (Clarel); the magnetic influences and avian observers in “The Haglets” and the “inhuman Sea” hailed in “Pebbles” (John Marr and Other Sailors [1888]); and the personifications of matter in “Fragments of a Lost Gnostic Poem of the 12th Century” and the coupling of aesthetics and materialization in “Art” and in “The Great Pyramid” (Timoleon [1891]). Yet there appears to be something about Melville’s poetry or about the narratives told about his career that renders many of these texts impalpable for most critics and theorists beyond Melville specialists.
Ahab Unbound shrewdly foregrounds the hypercanonical Moby-Dick and its cynosure Ahab, who, despite the myriad interpretive uses to which he has been put, remains for many interpreters an emblem of isolated subjectivity and regal, if ultimately thwarted, agency. Moby-Dick and its protagonist offer Farmer and Schroeder a striking opportunity to illustrate the differences that materialism can make in our literary and political comprehensions. Across the essays in this volume, Ahab’s sovereignty is dismantled, his subjectivity dispersed, his agency measured out. Melville, of course, stages similar effects in his narrative, but as tragedy rather than as ontology. The prominence of Ahab in Farmer and Schroeder’s materialist volume also, surprisingly, has the effect of advancing the trend among some recent critics to restore Ahab’s centrality to discussions of Melville’s book. For many, interest had shifted to the narrator, as signaled in Walter E. Bezanson’s endorsement of Ishmael’s imaginative openness and curiosity in his pivotal 1953 essay “Moby-Dick: Work of Art,” or to the collaborations between Ishmael and Ahab, as signaled in Donald Pease’s influential 1987 Visionary Compacts: American Renaissance Writings in Cultural Context. Pease viewed the choice between Ahab and Ishmael as false, arguing instead that Ahab’s compulsions and Ishmael’s deferrals together enabled an oppressive shipboard order. Neither extolling Ishmael nor conflating narrator and protagonist but returning to the traditional critical emphasis on Ahab, Clare L. Spark has told a story about twentieth-century scholars’ ambivalent response to Melville’s insurgent and defiant captain in her Hunting Captain Ahab: Psychological Warfare and the Melville Revival (2001). K. L. Evans has defended Ahab’s convictions and argued for Melville’s philosophical realism, his rejection of the persistent Western dualism between mind and world, and his assertion of language’s capacity to unite the sensible and the ideal. The epistemology that Evans describes in One Foot in the Finite: Melville’s Realism Reclaimed (2018) would appear in some ways to be compatible with recent materialisms and in other ways to challenge their investments, especially in the seriousness with which she treats Melville’s approach to language. For critics who seek to revise our understanding of Ahab, the character’s elaborate critical history, stretching from the 1850s to the present, might have played a larger role in their accounts, clarifying the extent to which their “rethinking” does and does not involve a return. Of those who focus on Ahab in this volume, only Farmer and John Modern consider that history in any detail.6
With the enthusiasm of the “new,” most of the contributors to Ahab Unbound embrace their materialisms and productively reorient our thinking about Melville’s characters, environments, objects, and politics. While Haines, Sbriglia, and Taylor question aspects of contemporary materialist thought (and a valuable discrepancy opens up between Taylor’s skepticism and Honig’s ardor), many of the other contributors seamlessly join critical approach and literary artifact. Haines asserts distinctions between subjects and objects that he feels some materialists blur, but he sutures Melville and Malabou at the hip, as though the nineteenth-century fiction writer and the twenty-first-century philosopher were materialist coauthors. The next phase of Melville and materialism might also consider how his texts resist the theories. Michael Jonik makes a similar point in his essay on Mardi, arguing, “Given the co-presence of idealist and materialist philosophies, the question, perhaps, is not whether Mardi is either idealist or materialist; the question is how the two relate—an issue that remains far from settled.”7 To suggest that the example of Melville might complicate the materialist assumptions brought to literary texts is not to discount those assumptions but rather, if I might put the case this way, to be receptive to the “materiality” of Melville’s words, their strange vitality and recalcitrance.
And so I should here confess that for me as a reader, Melville’s writings are distinguished by tensions and discrepancies that tend to be underplayed in several of the essays in this volume with their striving to unravel dualisms. The tensions and discrepancies that I have in mind are not the Melvillean contradictions that Evans views as having been too comfortably prized by generations of critics, but a persistent reflective unease and a vigilance about stopping short that mark his verbal pursuits and often shape his humor.8 Bennett distances herself from a political quietism that some, like Boysen, have associated with recent materialisms. Explaining her philosophical debt to ideas about the unity of matter held by Lucretius and Spinoza and how her approach differs from the beliefs held by some contemporary proponents of “deep ecology,” Bennett writes that her “monism posits neither a smooth harmony of parts nor a diversity unified by a common spirit. The formula here, writes Deleuze, is ‘ontologically one, formally diverse.’ This is, as Michel Serres says in The Birth of Physics, a turbulent, immanent field in which various and variable materialities collide, congeal, morph, evolve, and disintegrate.”9 Bennett describes a monism characterized by incongruity and instability, but it remains unclear in literary terms how we might apply Deleuze’s proposal (derived from Spinoza) of ontological unity and formal hetereogeneity. Antidualist commitments can underplay discordant literary evidence. Ahab may be overcome by emotional empathy, as Pilar Martínez Benedí and Ralph Savarese argue provocatively in their essay, but he is also obsessed with revenge and with inflicting corporeal damage.
Bonnie Honig vividly contrasts the different responses to the flesh of the whale that are portrayed in Moby-Dick: Ahab’s attempted mastery, Starbuck’s economic interest, the sailors’ acrid rendering of blubber in Chapter 96, “The Try-Works,” and especially the ways in which the crew are transformed by their haptic and aromatic experiences while manipulating the spermaceti, in “A Squeeze of the Hand.” She interprets this extraordinary scene as figuring the “shape(lessness)” of democratic possibility. The sailors on the Pequod may revel in their bath of spermaceti, may inhale and be altered by its substance, but this chapter also represents whale flesh in another sensory array that would seem to complicate, but not necessarily contradict, Honig’s distinctions. Michael Snediker, in Contingent Figure, is one of the few critics to acknowledge that the frequently extracted lines about pressing the cooling lumps of spermaceti back into fluid are succeeded in “A Squeeze of the Hand” by an astounding inventory of artifacts that result from the effort to ready the whale carcass for boiling in the tryworks furnace.10 In the second part of the chapter, after a dividing line of asterisks, the narrator Ishmael places on display various items in the blubber room below decks, a cetacean butcher shop whose cuts of meat far exceed their use value. This severed flesh seems to be given a life, or at least an extravagant chromatic and tactile status, of its own. Readers are introduced to the congealed tendons of the “white-horse” that when further sliced resemble blocks of Berkshire marble; the “ineffably oozy, stringy affair” named “slobgollion”; the glutinous and dark “gurry”; and the jaw-dropping “plum-pudding” whose variegated textures and figurative surfeit invoke the qualities of Melville’s book: “of an exceedingly rich, mottled tint, with a bestreaked snowy and golden ground, dotted with spots of the deepest crimson and purple. It is plums of rubies, in pictures of citron.” What do we make of the relationships between the two sections of “A Squeeze of the Hand,” the spermaceti epiphany and the exquisite slabs? How do we interpret the mixture—or is it juxtaposition or dissociation—of sensory experience, eloquence, and slaughter? What are the trajectories of the joke that compares whale flesh with the flesh of a certain portly twelfth-century king of France, when Ishmael speculates, after stealing a taste of “plum-pudding,” that its savor might resemble that of “a royal cutlet from the thigh of Louis le Gros . . . supposing him to have been killed the first day after the venison season, and that particular venison season contemporary with an unusually fine vintage of the vineyards of Champagne”? Materialist critics, attending to the unregarded world of matter and mind in Melville’s texts, would seem primed to address such questions but, reveling in the squeeze rather than the slice, they have not yet done so.11
In the spectacular last paragraph of “The Chart,” when Ahab rushes from his cabin and “the eternal, living principle or soul in him” seeks escape from his “characterizing mind,” Melville proceeds to confuse this opening dichotomy through a series of further divisions and occlusions, splintering the captain’s agency and relocating it outside the boundaries of his individual body and personal self, as Mark Noble and Matthew Taylor show in their essays. Materialist interpretations have returned scrutiny to this psychosomatic episode, which had been a textual crux for many interpreters from 1960 to 1990 but then receded under historicism’s dominance. Illuminating “The Chart” via current reassessments of human subjectivity and agency, Noble and Taylor deepen our awareness of the unraveled Ahab. But there is a “horror” in this scene (“horror” and “horror-stricken” are Melville’s qualifiers)—expressed by the narrator Ishmael, associated with the protagonist Ahab, eliciting at least the partial sympathies of the author—that remains unexplained in such readings. Depicting Ahab’s self-consuming self-division, Melville overplays the gothic rhetoric and trappings (chasms, forked flames, lightnings, accursed fiends), and he summons a range of literary allusions: Thomas Browne’s devil-inhabited heart, John Milton’s Satan and his internal Hell, Percy Shelley’s devoured Prometheus, Byron’s tortured Manfred, and Mary Shelley’s anguished dyad of creature and creator. Ahab is dispersed into the literary history of British Romantic hero–rebels, but this dispersal also concentrates the impact of the character. Ahab’s loss of integrity may be occasional (he “was for the time but a vacated thing,” Melville writes) or cyclical or ontological, but that loss, or at least its feeling, is associated with panic in “The Chart.” The narrator tells us that Ahab’s parts do not cohere and that he experiences his boundaries as dissolving. The referents for the erratic pronouns in the scene are indecipherable. And for the author, at least, this condition seems to be a problem to consider rather than a new way of appreciating the world.12
The status of language, and more specifically of literary discourse, in materialist approaches to Melville remains underarticulated. A resistance to anthropocentrism and to elevating the human manipulation of signs and symbols may play a role here, as Christian Haines suggests in his contribution. Donald Pease in the opening paragraphs of his essay describes the “materialist turn” as in part a response to an earlier “linguistic turn,” which has been criticized for detaching language from things and elevating textual representations over a purportedly inert or ultimately irretrievable world. A materialist caution about the privileges accorded to language may be desirable, but words too are material things, literature is composed of signs, and Melville is the distinctive focal point in this inquiry. The political theorists Diana Coole and Samantha Frost preserve a role in their New Materialisms for what we might consider literary aspects: “The human species, and the qualities of self-reflection, self-awareness, and rationality traditionally used to distinguish it from the rest of nature, may now seem little more than contingent and provisional forms or processes within a broader evolutionary or cosmic productivity. . . . While it does not follow that cognitive capacities for symbolism or reflexivity are no longer valued, the new materialism does prompt a way of reconsidering them as diffuse, chance products of a self-generative nature from which they never entirely emerge.”13 But such a centrifugal redescription seems inadequate for explaining the verbal and conceptual intricacies of Melville’s texts.
In Sweet Science, Amanda Goldstein provides one compelling model for literary and materialist analysis. She argues that the tropes of Romantic-era writers such as Erasmus Darwin, Percy Shelley, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, and William Blake were part of a neo-Lucretian discourse that explored and enacted the reciprocities of a “figural reality” in which things are involved in their perception and representation. She contrasts this collaboration between object and perceiver with Paul de Man’s claim that the materiality of language exposes the illusion of natural correspondence. In Ahab Unbound, Branka Arsić similarly connects trope and world, arguing that Melville in Moby-Dick, as an alternative to Buffon’s concept of an “inward mould” (the invisible template that shapes matter into form), embodies whales through porous figures. Michael Snediker and Colin Dayan consider the matter of Melville’s sentences: their peculiar substantiality, verging on autonomy. Snediker, like Goldstein, describes an intimate link between figuration and materiality, but in different terms. He shows how Melville’s prose in Moby-Dick becomes a medium in which the experience of pain—its duration, excess, and corrosiveness—unfolds in oblique or detached relation to the characters and their plots. Dayan examines the strange permeability of Melville’s sentences in Israel Potter: the syntax open to detritus and residue, the similes that invalidate the dividing lines between animate and inanimate forms.14
Ahab looks different after reading the essays in this volume, as does Moby-Dick, as do Melville’s representations of subjectivity, agency, matter, and mind. The writers demonstrate the ways that materialisms can reorient our thinking about Melville’s crucial book and its conspicuous protagonist; they also indicate the value of extending their concerns to the range of his writings. The essays in Ahab Unbound generate questions about the relationships between new and old materialisms and about the fit and the gaps between new interdisciplinary approaches to materialism and the field of literary studies. What kind of object is a literary object? What kind of materiality is verbal materiality? What kind of a thing is an author? These are consequential questions, goading us to rethink not only Ahab and Melville but also the assumptions and practices of both literary and materialist inquiry, and their renewed salience is one of the many contributions made by the remarkable essays in this volume.
1. Diana Coole and Samantha Frost, “Introducing the New Materialisms,” in New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency, and Politics, ed. Diana Coole and Samantha Frost (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2010), 1–43. The contributors to the volume are largely from the fields of political theory and cultural studies.
2. Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2009), vii–viii, xiv; Amanda Jo Goldstein, Sweet Science: Romantic Materialism and the New Logics of Life (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017), 22.
3. Benjamin Boysen, “The Embarrassment of Being Human: A Critique of New Materialism and Object-Oriented Ontology,” Orbis Litterarum 73 (2018): 225–42; I have quoted the phrase from page 237.
4. Michael D. Snediker, Contingent Figure: Chronic Pain and Queer Embodiment (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2021), 49–60; Michael Jonik, “Melville, Mardi, and the New Materialism,” in The New Melville Studies, ed. Cody Marrs (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2019), 169–85. Jonik assesses Melville’s career-long exploration of ideas about knowledge and existence that are not centered on the individual human figure and his articulation of shifting collectivities in Herman Melville and the Politics of the Inhuman (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2018). Geoffrey Sanborn has savored Melville’s responsiveness to the nonhuman world, focusing on the short story “Cock-A-Doodle-Doo!” (1853); see Sanborn, “Melville and the Nonhuman World,” in The New Cambridge Companion to Herman Melville, ed. Robert S. Levine (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 10–21.
5. Jonik, Herman Melville and the Politics of the Inhuman, 172–229; Branka Arsić, “Desertscapes: Geological Politics in Clarel,” in Melville’s Philosophies, ed. Branka Arsić and K. L. Evans (New York: Bloomsbury, 2017), 377–401.
6. Walter E. Bezanson, “Moby-Dick: Work of Art,” in Moby-Dick: Centennial Essays, ed. Tyrus Hillway and Luther S. Mansfield (Dallas: Southern Methodist University Press, 1953), 30–58; Donald E. Pease, Visionary Compacts: American Renaissance Writings in Cultural Context (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1987), 235–75; Clare L. Spark, Hunting Captain Ahab: Psychological Warfare and the Melville Revival (Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 2001); K. L. Evans, One Foot in the Finite: Melville’s Realism Reclaimed (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2018), and see also her Whale! (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003). For appraisals of Ahab’s critical history, see Luther S. Mansfield and Howard P. Vincent, introduction to Moby-Dick; or, The Whale, by Herman Melville (New York: Hendricks House, 1962), xvi–xxxiii; Harold Bloom, ed., Major Literary Characters: Ahab (New York: Chelsea House, 1991); and Spark, Hunting Captain Ahab.
7. Jonik, “Melville, Mardi, and Materialism,” 170–71; see also 184.
8. K. L. Evans, One Foot in the Finite, 14–18.
9. Bennett, Vibrant Matter, xi.
10. Snediker, Contingent Figure, 46–48.
11. Herman Melville, Moby-Dick; or, The Whale, ed. Harrison Hayford, Hershel Parker, and G. Thomas Tanselle (Evanston: Northwestern University Press; Chicago: Newberry Library, 1988), 416–17.
12. Melville, Moby-Dick, 201–2.
13. Coole and Frost, New Materialisms, 20–21.
14. Goldstein, Sweet Science, 1–34, 100–35. Materialist work on Melville’s language in the years to come might also take note of the palpability of the words on his manuscript pages, drawing on scholarship by Elizabeth Renker, Strike through the Mask: Herman Melville and the Scene of Writing (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996); John Bryant, Melville Unfolding: Sexuality, Politics, and the Versions of “Typee” (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2008); and also Bryant’s The Fluid Text: A Theory of Revision and Editing for Book and Screen (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2002).