Leviathan is a skein of networks: Translations of nature and culture in Moby-Dick

ELH - English Literary History

Volumn 71, Issue 4, 2004, Pages 1039-1063

  Armstrong, Philip ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF CANTERBURY   (New Zealand)

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 60949778577     PISSN: 00138304     EISSN: 10806547     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1353/elh.2004.0044     Document Type: Review

References (88)

1. See Mark Niemeyer, "Manifest Destiny and Melville's Moby-Dick; or, Enlightenment Universalism and Aggressive Nineteenth-Century Expansionism in a National Text," Q/W/E/R/T/Y 9 (1999): 301-11.
2. Ishmael's panegyrics on the civilizing mission of American whaling draw on Edmund Burke's often cited speech in praise of the industry, cited in Thomas Beale's Natural History of the Sperm Whale (London: John Van Voorst, 1839), 142
3. and in Joseph Hart's Miriam Coffin, or, the Whale Fishermen (Nantucket: Mill Hill Press, 1995 [1834]), xxi, 4;
4. on the "memorial" presented to Congress by representatives from Nantucket during the 1820s (Hart, xxvi-xix); on the conclusion to Charles Wilkes's Narrative of the United States Exploring Expedition During the Years 1838, 1839, 1840, 1841, 1842, 5 vols. (Philadelphia: Lea & Blanchard, 1845), 5:484-86;
5. and on popular "true stories" about whaling life such as Jeremiah Reynolds's "Mocha Dick: Or, the White Whale of the Pacific," in Moby-Dick: A Norton Critical Edition, ed. Hershel Parker and Harrison Hayford, 2nd ed. (New York: W. W. Norton, 2002 [1839]), 549-65. Hereafter abbreviated M and cited parenthetically by page number. For Ishmael's panegyrics, see pages 65 and 99.
6. Cesare Casarino, Modernity at Sea: Melville, Marx, Conrad in Crisis (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 2002), 5, 74-75.
7. The decline of the sperm whale fishery is described in Casarino, 82-83.
8. For late-nineteenth- century accounts see Alexander Starbuck's 1882 History of the American Whale Fishery (Secaucus, NJ: Castle, 1989), 110-13;
9. and Thomas Macy's 1880 supplement to Obed Macy's 1835 History of Nantucket (Clifton: Augustus M. Kelley, 1972), 290 and following.
10. The impact of industrial modernity upon human-animal relations has been surveyed briefly by John Berger in "Vanishing Animals," New Society 39 (1977): 664-65.
11. For more detailed accounts, see Barbara Noske, Beyond Boundaries: Humans and Animals (Montréal: Black Rose, 1997)
12. and Adrian Franklin, Animals and Modern Cultures: A Sociology of Human-Animal Relations in Modernity (London: Sage, 1999).
13. See Eric Wilson, "Melville, Darwin, and the Great Chain of Being: Herman Melville's Influence on Charles Darwin's Theory of Evolution," Studies in American Fiction 28 (2000): 131-50.
14. The converse of Burke's vision of the civilizing influence of American whalers is best represented by Henry Cheever in his 1850 book The Whale and His Captors (Fairfield, WA: Ye Galleon Press, 1991); for Cheever, whaling proved morally debilitating because of the brutalizing nature of the trade, long absences from hearth and home, and exposure to the godless cultures of the Pacific and elsewhere.
15. For his detailed descriptions of the factory ship's processing of whales, Melville draws upon J. Ross Browne's 1846 Etchings of a Whaling Cruise (Cambridge: Belknap Press, Harvard Univ. Press, 1968).
16. Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, trans. Catherine Porter (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1993), 37.
17. Latour, 32, 10-11.
18. Latour, 120.
19. For an excellent precursor to the reading I offer here, see T. Hugh Crawford's article "Networking the (Non)Human: Moby-Dick, Matthew Fontaine Maury, and Bruno Latour," Configurations 5 (1997): 1-21.
20. Crawford focuses on mid-nineteenth-century oceanography as the domain within which Ahab represents the desire to standardize the unpredictable "networks that produce reality," while my own analysis concentrates on the politics and economics of race and gender as the contexts within which wMoby-Dick maps out the complex of translations between nature and culture (Crawford, 9).
21. Latour, 47, citing Donna Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New York: Routledge, 1991).
22. Michael Paul Rogin, Subversive Genealogy: The Politics and Art of Herman Melville (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1985), 138.
23. For readings of the novel that focus upon the idea of mastering nature through industrial technology, see Stephen Ausband, "The Whale and the Machine: An Approach to Moby-Dick," American Literature 47 (1975): 197-211;
24. Richard Wixon, "Herman Melville: Critic of America and Harbinger of Ecological Crisis," in Literature and the Lore of the Sea, ed. Patricia Ann Carlson (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1986), 143-53;
25. Elizabeth Schultz, "Melville's Environmental Vision in Moby-Dick," Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment 7.1 (2000): 111.
26. David Mitchell, "'Too Much of a Cripple': Ahab, Dire Bodies, and the Language of Prosthesis in Moby-Dick," Leviathan 1.1 (1999): 10.
27. Schultz, 111-12.
28. Reynolds, 551.
29. See Moby-Dick, 325-28.
30. Reynolds, 550.
31. Elsewhere I have discussed in detail how the agency demonstrated by the "fighting" whale is represented in Moby-Dick and its sources. See my "What Animals Mean, in Moby-Dick for Example" (forthcoming in Textual Practice 19.1 [February 2005]).
32. The most famous first-hand account of this incident is Owen Chase's Wreck of the Whaleship Essex (London: Review, 2000 [1821]).
33. Nathaniel Philbrick, In the Heart of the Sea: The Epic True Story That Inspired Moby-Dick (London: HarperCollins, 2000), 224.
34. John Deblois, in Clement Cleveland Sawtell, The Ship Ann Alexander of New Bedford, 1805-1851 (Mystic, Conn.: Marine Historical Association, 1962), 72-73.
35. Wilkes, 5:493.
36. See for example Beale, 9-10;
37. or Frederick Bennett, Narrative of a Whaling Voyage around the Globe from the Year 1833 to 1836, 2 vols. (London: Richard Bentley, 1840), 2:176-77.
38. Tim Flannery, The Future Eaters: An Ecological History of the Australasian Lands and People (Chatswood, New South Wales: Reed, 1994), 188.
39. Howard Vincent, The Trying-out of Moby-Dick (Cambridge, MA: Riverside, 1949), 301-3;
40. Bennett, 2:171-72.
41. Beale, 76-77.
42. Francis Olmsted, Incidents of a Whaling Voyage (Rutland, Vermont: C. E. Tuttle & Co., 1969 [1841]), 157.
43. The phrase cited here is Frans de Waal's gloss on a definition of culture proposed by Kinji Imanishi. As de Waal argues, the notion that animals possess the capacity for such nongenetic, noninstinctual learning, and furthermore for the transmission of this knowledge between individuals and generations, has only recently begun to be taken seriously (again?) by ethologists; see especially his brief comments on recent studies of cetacean cultural knowledge in The Ape and the Sushi Master (London: Penguin, 2001), 214, 270;
44. this idea is also discussed in Noske (134-35, 155), and in Erica Fudge's Animal (London: Reaktion, 2002), 133.
45. For example Georges-Louis Leclerc de Buffon's voluminous and popular Histoire Naturelle "regularly draw[s] on anthropomorphic vocabulary ... as a pedagogical and literary tool," as observed by Jeff Loveland in his book Rhetoric and Natural History: Huffon in Polemical and Literary Context (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 2001), 69.
46. Keith Thomas, Man and the Natural World: Changing Attitudes in England 1500-1800 (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1984), 66.
47. Thomas, 68.
48. Thomas, 91.
49. See Fudge; see also Chris Philo and Chris Wilbert's introduction to their collection Animal Spaces, Beastly Places: New Geographies of Human-Animal Relations (New York: Routledge, 2000), 1-36.
50. Marshall Sahlins, The Use and Abuse of Biology: An Anthropological Critique of Sociobiology (Ann Arbor: Univ. of Michigan Press, 1976), xv.
51. See Noske (80-125) for an elaboration of Sahlins's thesis. Noske's emphasis on the co-construction of human and animal gender codes is particularly relevant to the remainder of my discussion.
52. See Sahlins, 93, 101.
53. For a detailed assessment of the assumption, shared by ecocritics, that Moby-Dick's humanization of the whale functions to inspire compassion for animals, see my article "Moby-Dick and Compassion," Society and Animals 12.1 (2004): 19-38.
54. See Browne, 539-64;
55. and Hart, xxi-xxix.
56. Philo and Wilbert, 19
57. citing Latour, 137.
58. As well as those discussed in detail in the remainder of this essay, persuasive accounts of the politics of race in Moby-Dick have been offered by Marius Bewley, "Melville and the Democratic Experience," in Melville: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Richard Chase (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1962), 91-115;
59. John Bryant, "Moby-Dick as Revolution," in The Cambridge Companion to Herman Melville, ed. Robert Levine (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1998), 65-90;
60. Niemeyer; Timothy Marr, "Melville's Ethnic Conscriptions," Leviathan 3.1 (2001): 5-29.
61. C. L. R. James, Mariners and Renegades: The Story of Herman Melville and the World We Live In (New York: C. L. R. James, 1953), 18.
62. Alan Heimert "Moby-Dick and American Political Symbolism," American Quarterly 15 (1963): 502.
63. See John Staud, "'What's in a Name?': The Pequod and Melville's Heretical Politics," ESQ 48 (1992): 339-59.
64. Casarino, 141.
65. Rogin, 99-100, 107, 119, 143.
66. See Hart, 155-62, 282-88, 300.
67. Hart, 317.
68. See Vincent, 30-5;
69. Beale, 65;
70. Bennett, 2:179;
71. and Olmsted, 139.
72. Ann Douglas, The Feminization of American Culture (New York: Noonday, 1998), 74.
73. See Robert Zoellner, The Salt-Sea Mastodon: A Reading of Moby-Dick (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1973), 180-85;
74. Schultz, 104-5.
75. Douglas, 329.
76. Douglas, 304-5.
77. Sawtell, 82.
78. See Joan Druett, Petticoat Whalers: Whaling Wives at Sea, 1820-1920 (Auckland: Collins, 1991), 25-38.
79. DeBlois, quoted in Sawtell, 72.
80. Reynolds, 565.
81. Reynolds, 558.
82. Beale, 32;
83. Bennett, 1:177-78.
84. Bennett, 1:206.
85. See Starbuck, 126-28;
86. and Cheever, 185-88.
87. Richard Brodhead, intro. to New Essays on Moby-Dick, ed. Brodhead (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1983), 9-10.
88. See for example Geoffrey Sanborn's suggestion that the most vividly drawn nonwhite character in the novel, Queequeg, dissolves into a kind of phantom or simulacrum, a representation of the ultimate emptiness of capitalist modernity's desire for (and, I would argue, anxiety about its economic dependence upon) "the ideality of savagery" (Sanborn, The Sign of the Cannibal: Melville and the Making of a Postcolonial Reader [Durham: Duke Univ. Press, 1998], 168).