Ahab Unbound This page intentionally left blank 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. Published by the University of Minnesota Press 111 Third Avenue South, Suite 290 Minneapolis, MN 55401- 2520 http://www.upress.umn.edu ISBN 978-1-5179-0754-9 (hc) ISBN 978-1-5179-0755-6 (pb) 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. 28 27 26 25 24 23 22 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 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