Ahab Unbound: Melville and the Materialist Turn

465 Pages·2022·5.379 MB·English

by  Meredith Farmer (editor), Jonathan D. S. Schroeder (editor)

Ahab Unbound
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Ahab Unbound
Melville and the Materialist Turn
•• Meredith Farmer and
Jonathan D. S. Schroeder Editors
Afterword by Samuel Otter
University of Minnesota Press
Minneapolis • London
The University of Minnesota Press gratefully acknowledges the financial assistance
provided for the publication of this book by Wake Forest University, the University of
Warwick, and Dartmouth College.
The commentary presented here is continued and expanded on a website related to this
book at ahabunbound.org.
The poem “The Lee Shore” by Steve Mentz was first published in Glasgow Review of
Books in “Sailing without Ahab: An Eco- Poetic Voyage,” April 11, 2017, https://
glasgowreviewofbooks.com/2017/04/11/sailing-without-ahab-an-eco-poetic-voyage/.
An earlier version of chapter 6 was originally published as “Phenomenology beyond the
Phantom Limb: Melvillean Figuration and Chronic Pain,” in Melville’s Philosophies, ed.
Branka Arsić and K. L. Evans (Bloomsbury Academic, an Imprint of Bloomsbury
Publishing, 2017); reprinted by permission. Portions of chapter 14 are adapted from
“‘Israel Potter’; or, the Excrescence,” Los Angeles Review of Books, December 19, 2017;
reprinted by permission of the Los Angeles Review of Books; passages of the essay were
first published in Colin Dayan, The Law Is a White Dog: How Legal Rituals Make and
Unmake Persons (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011).
Excerpts from Devo’s “Fraulein,” “Mechanical Man,” and “Recombo DNA” are reprinted
with permission from Gerald Casale.
Copyright 2022 by the Regents of the University of Minnesota
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval
system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical,
photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the
publisher.
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ISBN 978-1-5179-0754-9 (hc)
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Library of Congress record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021051565
Printed in the United States of America on acid- free paper
The University of Minnesota is an equal- opportunity educator and employer.
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Contents
Rethinking Ahab: Melville and the Materialist Turn
Meredith Farmer 1
PART I. ONTOLOGIES
1. Sailing without Ahab Steve Mentz 47
2. Ambiental Cogito: Ahab with Whales Branka Arsić 65
3. Ahab after Agency Mark D. Noble 93
4. Thinking with a Wrinkled Brow; or, Herman Melville,
Catherine Malabou, and the Brains of New Materialism
Christian P. Haines 109
PART II. RELATIONS
5. Phantom Empathy: Ahab and Mirror- Touch Synesthesia
Pilar Martínez Benedí and Ralph James Savarese 127
6. Phenomenology beyond the Phantom Limb: Melvillean
Figuration and Chronic Pain Michael D. Snediker 145
7. “The King Is a Thing”; or, Ahab as Subject of the Unconscious:
A Lacanian Materialist Reading Russell Sbriglia 161
8. Approaching Ahab Blind Christopher Castiglia 179
PART III. POLITICS
9. “This Post- Mortemizing of the Whale”:
The Vapors of Materialism, New and Old Bonnie Honig 197
10. Ahab’s Electromagnetic Constitution Donald E. Pease 227
11. The Whiteness of the Will: Ahab and the Matter of
Monomania Jonathan D. S. Schroeder 277
12. Diet on the Pequod and the Wreck of Reason
Jonathan Lamb 301
PART IV. NEW MELVILLES
13. Ahab’s After- Life: The Tortoises of “The Encantadas”
Matthew A. Taylor 323
14. Israel Potter; or, The Excrescence Colin Dayan 345
15. Melville, Materiality, and the Social Hieroglyphics of
Leisure and Labor Ivy G. Wilson 359
16. Melville’s Basement Tapes John Modern 375
Afterword: Melville among the Materialists Samuel Otter 413
Acknowledgments 429
Contributors 435
Index 439
Rethinking Ahab
Melville and the Materialist Turn
•• Meredith Farmer
For years critics have viewed Herman Melville’s Captain Ahab as the
paradigm of a strong, controlling agent: “the supreme individualist of
the nineteenth century” whose passions “fuse other men into instru-
ments for his own egocentric will.”1 The story generally goes something like
this: Ahab abuses his power by dragging his crew along on his obsessive quest
after the infamous white whale. Then, in the end, everybody drowns. In
Eric Wilson’s concise configuration, Ahab conscripts his entire world “into
his monomaniacal projects and ends by killing his crew, save one.”2 But this
critical consensus simply does not hold against the text of Moby- Dick.3 As
the work in Ahab Unbound will explain, monomania was a medical diag-
nosis, not a political designation. The term actually signifies a weakness of
the will. And when Ahab allegedly “fuses” other men into “instruments” of
his “egocentric will,” he does it, specifically, by distributing emotions that
“accumulated within the Leyden jar of his own magnetic life.”4 Instead of
finding a dictator, we seem to find a structure that stores and then distrib-
utes charge. Finally, in the moment when Ahab allegedly murders his entire
crew, we don’t find a cautionary tale about power or ideology. Instead we
find a vortex, which is cast in the language of nineteenth-c entury hurricanes.
At a time when meteorology was seen as one of America’s major contribu-
tions to science, everything in Moby- Dick gives way to a storm.
The chapters in this collection collectively prompt us to discover a very dif-
ferent Ahab: after brutally losing his leg in unfathomable working conditions,
Ahab suffered from a mental illness that is still widely mischaracterized and
misunderstood. He was physically disabled. He was constantly in pain. And
1
2 Meredith Farmer
he was malnourished. In the moment in “The Quarter- Deck” when Ahab is
allegedly at the peak of his power, Ishmael describes him as a sort of battery
that collects “fiery emotion”— then attempts to release it with hands that
“nervously twitched” (165). And Ahab never murders anyone. When we actu-
ally reach the final scene of Moby- Dick, we discover that “concentric circles
seized the lone boat itself, and all its crew.” Then “spinning”—s pecifically
“animate and inanimate, all round and round in one vortex”— is the actor
that unexpectedly “carried the smallest chip of the Pequod out of sight” (572).
This collection was motivated by a belief: we do not think the so- called
Cold War frame should be our only way into reading Melville’s Moby- Dick.5
And in response to these alternative readings, we set out to rethink Ahab
through a series of materialist frames, which have come to include atomism,
vitalism, neuroscience, disability studies, animal studies, posthumanism,
political theory, the medical humanities, and the environmental humani-
ties. Our contributors leave Ahab’s position as a Cold War icon behind
when they recast him as a contingent figure, transformed by his environ-
ment— by chemistry, electromagnetism, entomology, meteorology, diet, ill-
ness, pain, trauma, and neurons firing— in ways that unexpectedly force us
to see him as worthy of our empathy and our compassion.6 Collectively
these materialist readings challenge our ways of thinking about the bound-
aries of both persons and nations, along with the racist and environmental
violence caused by “personhood” and by “the human.”
•••
In recent years, Melville has emerged as a center of gravity for material-
ist work. We mark the advent of this “materialist turn” with Samuel Otter’s
Melville’s Anatomies (1999) and the attention it cast on Melville’s “corporeal
obsessions” and “materialist analyses.”7 This began with a turn to material
human bodies in texts like Branka Arsić’s Passive Constitutions (2007), Hester
Blum’s The View from the Masthead (2008), Sianne Ngai’s Ugly Feelings (2009),
and Amy Parsons’s work on “transnational labors” (2012), which pushed
materialism in two different directions: toward classical Marxist theories of
labor and toward materialist models of psychology, which framed thinking
as inextricable from embodied feelings and performances.8 A second wave
of readings moved past this interest in human bodies to consider a much
wider range of things and creatures. Geoffrey Sanborn described “Melville
Rethinking Ahab 3
and the Nonhuman World” (2013). Timothy Marr turned to “Melville’s
Planetary Compass” (2013). And Richard King offered Ahab’s Rolling Sea:
A Natural History of Moby- Dick (2019).9 Ahab Unbound helps initiate what
we see as a third wave of materialist work, which draws on work in fields
that include posthumanism, political theory, and disability studies to begin
to articulate the implications of this turn.10 Our authors collectively demon-
strate the extent to which ableism, racism, and other modes of discrimina-
tion depend upon arbitrary hierarchies of organic life and inorganic matter.
The four parts of Ahab Unbound build in scale from readings focused
on parts and particles to broader political and cultural formations. Part I,
“Ontologies,” situates Melville’s reconceptualization of bodies, agency, cog-
nition, and life itself as occasions for thinking with Melville about mate-
rialism. Part II, “Relations,” in turn suggests that we think seriously about
prosthetic personhood, directing attention to Ahab’s experiences of his
missing limb, his phantom limb, his chronic pain, and, ultimately, his expe-
rience of a subjectivity that is collective. This shift reveals new possibilities
for empathy and for compassion, even for a figure as maligned as Captain
Ahab. In Part III, “Politics,” Melville’s rejection of antebellum accounts of
the legal and medical structuring of life allows our authors to attend to his
more democratic registers, which recognize and represent the empowerment
of marginalized human and nonhuman actors. Finally, in Part IV, “New
Melvilles,” our authors reach past Moby- Dick to focus on the materiality of
Melville’s language in a broader range of work. They consider the ways
that Melville’s writing— and often his literary devices— help us think about
marginalization, raising questions about which subjects are fully alive and
how we can translate between them. Ultimately, these chapters collectively
engage with the ways that Melville’s language prompts readers to compose
new texts and future worlds.
Our contributors pose questions that reach across a multitude of imag-
ined borders and operate at different scales. They ask, how is Ahab like
a tortoise? How might neuroscience help us understand Ahab’s attraction
to Pip? How concerned should we be about Ahab’s diet? How does a more
democratic relation to life depend, unexpectedly, on smell? And what would
it look like to sail without Ahab—t o sail, that is, into a future like the one
imagined by the cybernetic punk group Devo?11 But when we suggest that
our contributors reach past materialist description and into articulations