TY - JOUR
AU1 - Krien, Brady
AB - All machines have their friction; and possibly this does enough good to counterbalance the evil. –Henry David Thoreau Introduction After its initial publication in 1852, Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick met poor sales and, at best, mixed reviews. While some critics praised the novel as an exceptionally engaging story and others panned it, most observed the book's defiance of standard genre conventions and the overwhelming amount of information it contained. The Britannia of London reported that “There is so much eccentricity in its style and in its construction, in the original conception and in the gradual development of its strange and improbable story, that we are at a loss to determine in what category of works of amusement to place it” (Parker 367). The Atlas called it “an encyclopædia of information, rhapsody, and speculation about the whale” (Parker 365). Many reviewers struggled to list all the disparate elements that it contained, but New York’s Literary World perhaps came closest, summing it up as a “natural-history, philosophical, romantic account of the person, habits, manners, ideas of the great sperm whale; of his haunts and his belongings; of his associations with the world of the deep, and of the not less remarkable individuals and combinations of individuals who hunt him on the oceans” (Parker 375). While commentaries on the novel called it everything from a work of genius to a work of insanity, Parker’s Journal tidily captured the prevailing mood when it accused Melville of “giving us altogether too much for our money” (Parker 386). Many subsequent readers and more than a few undergraduate students have commented on the informational sections, sometimes referred to as the “cetological chapters,” to which so many of these reviews of the novel referred. These nonfiction, encyclopedic chapters recur frequently throughout the course of Moby-Dick—devoted to topics such as whale fossils and the makeup of the international whaling fleet—and they account for, by Nina Baym’s count “at least a third of the work if one counts by chapters and considerably more than that if one counts by bulk” (917). The inclusion of these encyclopedic elements mean that Moby-Dick not only maps out the nautical path of the Pequod, but also the cultural, environmental, and economic systems within which nineteenth-century whaling was enmeshed. Ishmael continuously contextualizes and historicizes the plot of the novel, weaving biological, ecological, and cultural information into the narrative. These elements take the form of a web genres that include, as Baym has noted, such forms as the sermon; short story; occasional, scientific, political, and moral essay; satire; dictionary; encyclopedia; drama; dramatic monologue; manual; travelogue; character; tall tale; and prophecy. Its sections of fiction represent many different subgenera, from ghost story to melodrama to temperance tale to local-color sketch. (918) While these encyclopedic chapters can easily feel like an unchecked flood of footnotes, they do more than just provide important context about whaling. Interwoven as they are with the plot of the novel, they provide a model for systematic socio-ecological reading—they model Ishmael’s reading of the vast ecotechnological system of whaling, of its biological and social components, and of the frictions and failures within its mechanisms.1 Moby-Dick, in other words, is not just a sea story, but a sea story that attends to and describes the human and nonhuman systems that make the whaling industry possible. This ultimately makes Moby-Dick “something other than fiction” (Baym 917), and offers readers a story interwoven with a description of the ecotechnological system in which the plot of the novel plays out. The model of reading that Moby-Dick offers through these chapters is particularly relevant to understanding our own ecological moment in the early days of the Anthropocene. The ecotechnological system that Melville depicts is a predecessor to the extractive industrial operations that have such a major impact on our contemporary environment. While Ishmael’s world may be one of square-rigged ships rather than monstrous supertankers, his frequent descriptions of the extractive and mechanical nature of whaling, its importance to the advancement of industrial operations, and its role within a global marketplace have many close parallels in the modern fossil fuel industry. Moby-Dick thus contributes to the genealogy of the Anthropocene and, more importantly, models an approach to thinking through and with the radical changes occurring in this geological and ecological transition. Margaret Cohen has contended that “Herman Melville, Victor Hugo and Joseph Conrad, among others, disrupted sea fiction’s poetics to create a maritime modernism challenging the writer and reader to the difficult work of navigating the foggy uncharted seas of language and thought” (10) and that, in Moby-Dick, Melville uses the genre of sea fiction to explore working and living in “Edge zones,” liminal spaces that, like the outer reaches of the whaling grounds, were unknown and dangerous (Cohen 180). We find ourselves in such a moment, attempting to navigate the foggy and uncharted waters of a rapidly changing world-ecology, and Moby-Dick offers one possible approach to reading and storytelling that can help to chart and make sense of our current, ongoing catastrophe. Ecotechnological Systems—Melville and the Machine Ecotechnological systems, at their most basic level, involve “interacting natural and human-built systems” (Hughes 156) that can range from the environmentally responsive architecture of Frank Lloyd Wright to the Colorado River’s system of dams and reservoirs. Such a system operates at the intersection of the human and the non-human and is, in Richard White’s classic formulation, “An energy system which, although modified by human interventions, maintains its natures, its ‘unmade’ qualities” (ix). In the decades before the Civil War, whaling was a preeminent ecotechnological system. Though whaling was complex, involving multinational fleets harnessing wind and wave to hunt whales and satisfy global demand for a variety of products, Richard Alley sums up its systematic essence best: “Quite simply, humans burned whales for energy” (35). Machines and technology have long been central themes in scholarship on Moby-Dick. The novel reflects whaling’s importance in the process of industrialization, providing both the light and the lubrication for the machinery that became central to US production and many scholars have examined Moby-Dick in the context of this historical shift toward manufacturing and industry (Scott 5). Most, however, have done so in a way that sets the machine in opposition to the environment. Stephen C. Ausband, for example, claims that “a machine is the perfect metaphor to describe Ahab’s force, and only in the opposition of the mechanical to the natural could Melville have pictured so powerfully and so perfectly a man waging relentless, mindless war on the essence of life” (211). While these critiques have accurately captured the destructive potential of Melville’s machines, they have yet to consider the ways in which whaling and industrialization, both historically and within Moby-Dick, subsumed nature into their own workings. Historicizing the relationship between the technology and the environment not only avoids the teleology that has tended to plague the history of industrialization, it also enables a more nuanced understanding of the contingency of technological development. Pritchard and Zeller suggest that scholars should explore the ecology of industrialization, zeroing in on “the ways in which industrial processes were embedded within, and thus ultimately dependent upon, natural resources, environmental processes, and ecosystems” (70). This form of analysis examines humans “transform[ing the] very context through the diverse sociotechnical processes … composed industrialization” (73), by tracking humans as they engineer ecology and technology into ecotechnological systems. These systems, ranging from power a mill by yoking oxen to powering Las Vegas via the Hoover Dam, are fundamentally an intersection rather than a division of nature and culture. As a quintessential nineteenth-century ecotechnological system, whaling involves this integration of human technology—including ships, whale boats, harpoons, and rendering works—with the energy systems of the ocean to produce a variety of whale byproducts from machine oil to women’s corsets. Melville depicted other nineteenth century ecotechnological industries, such as the paper mills in his “The Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids,” in which he “urg[es] his readership to see connections, realize how local wrongs are globally intertwined” (Schöberlein 732), but they are dwarfed by the globally interconnected vision of the whaling industry that he develops in Moby-Dick. By 1852, New England’s whaling vessels sailed across the globe and relied upon elaborate concatenations of equipment with which most of Melville’s readers would have been unfamiliar. In Moby-Dick, Melville depicts the ways in which these technological elements of whaling intersect with the marine ecosystem to offer his readers a detailed depiction of the ecotechnological system of whaling within which the crew of the Pequod operated. Advances in the technology of whaling were central to its emergence as a major economic and industrial force in the second half of the eighteenth century. Innovations such as the installation of try-works (vats used for rendering blubber into oil) on whaling ships allowed whalers to render blubber at sea rather than on land, indefinitely extending their range and leading to a radical shift in whalers’ operations. The introduction of try-works ushered in a period when, as Jay Dolin has suggested, “colonial whalemen were not only engaged in a business of international importance, but they were also among the first, and perhaps the first, colonial laborers to be part of what could reasonably be called an industrial assembly line” (Dolin 108). The greater range allowed by the development of the on-ship try works was the key to this industrial process as it almost entirely removed whalers’ dependence upon land. This led to a much more methodical approach to whaling so that, as Heidi Scott has argued, by the early nineteenth century, “professional whaling outfits built floating factories that held all the necessary equipment and expertise to seek, kill, retrieve and render a whale into tidy barrels below decks using an on-board-try-works” that ensured “These floating factories remained on the seas for years, and for profit’s sake would not return home until the ship sailed heavy in the water” (6). In his effort to offer his readers a full account of whaling, Melville conveys the ways in which industrial developments removed geographic bounds, serving as the basis for a global industry in a period before widespread industrialization. In Moby-Dick, Melville offers a clear portrayal of how humans worked to harness ecology for industrial ends. In analyzing this portrayal, Leo Marx argues: In the whaling world, Ishmael discovers, man’s primary relation to nature is technological. No detail figures this truth more clearly than the “magical, sometimes horrible whale-line’ he discusses in “The Line” (Chapter 60). This relatively insignificant passage—insignificant so far as the action is concerned—illustrates the astonishing range of insight released by Melville’s whaling trope. By describing the line that follows the harpoon, he discloses the elemental aspect of physical dependence, plunder, and exploit that underlies the deceptively mild, abstract quality of life in our technical civilization. Here the simple Manila rope is made to seem an archetype of the physical bond between man and nature, whether industrial or primitive. (295) These lines—individual strands twisted into the narrative of the novel—clearly connect the human and the ecological through depictions of technology. The whaling industry is reliant on these connections to the environment, physical and otherwise, and Melville’s description of the practice of whaling on board the Pequod leaves little doubt about the crew’s reliance on and role in sustaining ecotechnological systems. Fittingly, Melville splices in a wide variety of genres into his depiction of the complexities of whaling, pulling in strands of mythology, scientific description, and even drama, twisting them together and creating a narrative hawser or literary tow-rope, one that pulls his plot along though even the most complex elements of whaling. Melville, like Scott and Dolin, places a heavy emphasis on the importance of the try works aboard the Pequod and their role in liberating the ship from the constraints of land for, though wood was used to kindle initial firing of the try works, After that no wood is used, except as a means of quick ignition to the staple fuel. In a word, after being dried out, the crisp, shriveled blubber, called scraps or fritters, still contains considerable of its unctuous properties. These fritters feed the flames. Like a plethoric burning martyr, or a self-consuming misanthrope, once ignited, the whale supplies his own fuel and burns his own body. (312) The try works, in other words, render blubber into oil through burning blubber itself, a system in which the whale renders unto the whalers both the raw materials and the energy for producing whale oil. Though ultimately unsustainable, this hijacking of the energy cycles of the oceans creates what appears as a self-contained energy system: the Pequod relies on wind and whale to meet nearly all its energy needs and return to port with a hull full of stored energy in the form of oil. This is, at least superficially, a highly efficient means of producing fuel and its market all at once, a market that involved relatively limited inputs in the form of men, food, and machine. As Marx has argued, “Taken together, the details [of the try-works] form a composite image of industrial technology in the Age of Steam” (306) even though as Ishmael points out, it produces not steam but a greasy black smoke (439). This malodorous industrial marker makes the pollution of the supposedly clean-burning whale oil clearly legible. The ecotechnological scope of whaling and of Moby-Dick extend far beyond the rendering of blubber into the construction of the ship and crew itself. Given the dearth of wood available at sea, whale bone and teeth are used for a wide variety of functions, including, notably, fashioning a replacement peg leg for Ahab after he was “dismasted” by Moby Dick (Melville 103). The ship is, in Ishmael’s words, “a thing of trophies. A cannibal of a craft, tricking herself forth in the chased bones of her enemies. All round her, her unparalleled, open bulwarks were garnished like one continuous jaw, with the long sharp teach of the sperm whale, inserted there for pins, to fasten her old hempen thews and tendons to” (85). Even the navigation of the ship is reliant on this macabre technology for the “tiller was in one mass, curiously carved from the long narrow lower jaw of a hereditary foe” (85). The ship is an amalgam of technology and ecology, a floating manifestation of human industry wed to the by-products of the sea in a manner that is at once gruesome and efficient. This superficial efficiency—appearing to use every part of the whale—obscures the profoundly wasteful nature of whaling that is repeated throughout the novel as whales immobilized by “druggs” are left to die and sink or massive carcasses are set loose on the waves. It’s the nautical equivalent of slash-and-burn timber harvesting or strip mining. At the center of Melville’s depiction of the ecotechnological system of whaling is Ahab, the Pequod’s infamous captain. Ahab appears himself to be a sort of organic machine; he is, as Ausband points out, described in “mechanistic-organic” terms (198) and his “description of his relationship with the crew leaves no doubt about his mechanical nature. He cares only for his quest, wishes only to force the crew mechanically to do his will: ‘My one cogged circle fits into all their various wheels, and they revolve’” (136). Ahab has even integrated himself with the ship, boring holes into the deck to provide places to secure his peg leg (Melville 103). Ahab’s ecotechnological nature is not limited to his prosthesis and his mechanistic mindset. He is undeniably a highly skilled whaler, capable of subtle readings and subsequent manipulations of the environment. He has, in his own words, experience amounting to “Forty years of continual whaling! forty years of privation, and peril, and storm time! forty years on the pitiless sea! for forty years has Ahab forsaken the peaceful land, for forty years to make war on the horrors of the deep” (389), a daunting resume for any whaler. One of the owners of the Pequod, Captain Peleg, claims that “Ahab’s been in colleges, as well as ‘mong the cannibals; been used to deeper wonders than the waves; fixed his fiery lance in mightier, stranger foes than whales. His lance! aye, the keenest and the surest that out of all our isle [Nantucket]” (73). Within the novel Ahab is widely recognized as one of the best and most experienced whalers in the Nantucket fleet, imagined as an undisputed master of wind, wave, and whale. Ahab’s ecotechnological prowess is frequently on display, to the point where he can pinpoint the location where he is most likely to find Moby Dick. Ishmael says that, though “to any one not fully acquainted with the ways of the leviathans, it might seem an absurdly hopeless task thus to seek our one solitary creature in the unhooped oceans of this planet,” Ahab’s mastery of his craft was so great that he knew the sets of all tides and currents; and thereby calculating the drifting of the sperm whale’s food; and, also, calling to mind the regular, ascertained seasons for hunting him in particular latitudes; could arrive at reasonable surmise, almost approaching certainties, concerning the timeliest day to be upon this or that ground in search of prey. (159) In this passage the implications of Ahab’s mastery of the ecotechnological machinery of whaling, a mastery so profound that he can predict where and when to most successfully hunt whales, becomes clear. Far from a haphazard hunt, whaling is, in the minds of experienced captains like Ahab, a predictable, readily manipulable system that, with sufficient knowledge enables an algorithmic approach to whale hunting. With this sort of expertise, whaling is portrayed as a form of engineering, of managing inputs to yield maximum outputs. Ahab, thus, functions as an engineer, operating a vast, almost mechanical system of killing and butchering. The framing of Ahab as an engineer recurs frequently throughout the novel. When lightning reverses the polarity of the ship’s compasses and makes navigation impractical, Ahab emerges from the depths of his cabin and summons a piece of iron, a maul, and a needle, calmly claiming that “the thunder turned old Ahab’s needle; but out of this bit of steel Ahab can make his own, that will point true as any” (373) and then, through a series of inscrutable actions, magnetized a needle and replaced the reversed one, effectively repairing the compass and reharnessing the very power of the earth itself. Though his experience, engineering, and prosthesis, Ahab becomes the living embodiment of the larger ecotechnological system of whaling. His reliance on his whale-bone prosthesis underscores whaling’s fusion of technology and environment and the human body, while his mastery of navigation and seamanship highlight whalers’ reliance on knowledge of their craft not to master the elements but to manipulate and maneuver through them. All together, these depictions of Ahab repeatedly show him reading his environment, understanding and responding to it through the lens of his own extensive experience in order to better manipulate it. This is in sharp contrast to Ishmael’s much more dialogic reading, which draws heavily and frequently upon his own extensive research. Where Ahab relies upon his own knowledge and expertise to read and navigate his environment, Ishmael relies upon his own wide reading of scientific, historical, and cultural sources to understand the environment in which he operates. Yet for all Ahab’s knowledge, there are major limits to his understanding and mastery of the systems in which he participates. Despite his ability to locate Moby Dick within the vast expanse of the oceans, his ivory leg stands as a reminder of his first, failed encounter with the white whale. He may be the unquestioned master of his ship and crew, capable of effectively reversing lightning and remagnetizing the compass, but that counts for nothing when Moby Dick sinks his ship and send him and nearly all his crew to the ocean floor. He may be a master whaler and a masterful ecotechnological engineer, but there is much that remains outside his control and beyond his knowledge. Nor does he have any sense of these limitations. This is a sharp contrast with Ishmael, who despite his extensive descriptions of whales, frequently comments on the limits of his own knowledge, acknowledging the many unknowns of the sperm whale from his habits of feeding (216) to his precise means of breathing (256). While Ahab may have broad experience and deep knowledge of whales, he remains ignorant of the bounds of his knowledge and he is ultimately destroyed by the very ecotechnological machinery that he seeks to bend to his will. Ishmael, in contrast and in retrospect, frequently identifies the outer limits of his knowledge and recognizes that which is unknowable and uncontrollable, circumscribing his own understanding. The ecotechnological system represented by nineteenth century whaling represented a major shift in the human relationship to the environment, one the Melville grapples with throughout the course of the novel. It leveraged multiple technical innovations to turn the once arcane art of seafaring, among the oldest of human endeavors, into a methodical process of harvesting and storing energy to for a multiplicity of industrial purposes. Melville effectively distills the ways in which, at this historical moment, the advent of certain technologies such as the on-board try-works converge with human ingenuity and expanding knowledge about the environment to develop a new relationship with the ocean’s ecology, one that emphasized inputs and outputs, systematic manipulations, and profit margins. Yet these technologies are only a part of the reason for whaling’s global scope. It relied upon the new machinery and factories back on shore to provide the demand for whale oil just as much as it relied upon the try-works in creating the supply. Melville regularly attends to this relationship and he repeatedly underscores the necessity of the social, economic, and ecological conditions for whaling that had culminated by this point in the nineteenth century. Without these larger systems, whaling would have never have achieved its devastating global impact. Systematic Charting and Socio-Ecology In addition to operating at the juncture of technology and environment, the ways in which Ahab and other whalers utilize and deploy that technology is subject to yet larger systems that Melville depicts at length throughout the course of Moby Dick. Melville’s seemingly relentless digressions reveal the extent to which whaling operates at the intersection of global trade, cultural traditions, and ecological systems. In doing so, he effectively depicts a very early version of what Jason Moore refers to as world-ecology, “a framework for unifying the production of nature, the pursuit of power, and the accumulation of capital, offers a way of re-reading the diversity of modern human experience as unavoidably, irreducibly, socio-ecological” (247). By continually enmeshing the tale of the Pequod within a global socio-ecological system, the plot of the novel depicts whaling as a global system that is defined as much by economics, history, and the environment as it is by the technological innovations that made it possible. While the Pequod’s voyage takes it from Nantucket to the remotest stretch of the Pacific, the market for the whale oil that it produced was even more expansive. Whale oil was an essential commodity, the nineteenth century analog of petroleum. It was such an important component of the economy that, “Until kerosene (or ‘coal oil’) hit the market in the second half of the nineteenth century, whale oil was the leading source of lamp oil used for illumination, and it provided the best lubrication for the hulking machines of the industrial age” (Scott 5). At the time of Moby-Dick’s publication, whaling had taken its place as “the first American industry to make global economic impacts” (4), a role Melville underscores when Ishmael claims that the world “unwittingly pays us [whalers] the profoundest homage; yea, an all-abounding adoration! for almost all the tapers, lamps, and candles that burn round the globe, burn, as before so many shrines, to our glory!” (92). Ishmael shows a remarkably detailed knowledge of the economic impact of whaling on both a national and international scale. He articulates the financial significance of whaling by stating that “Britain between the years of 1750 and 1788 [paid] to her whalemen in bounties upwards of £1,000,000” and that American whalemen “sail a navy of upward of seven hundred vessels, manned by eighteen thousand men; yearly consuming 4,000,000 of dollars; the ships work, at the time of sailing, $20,000,000; and every year importing into our harbors a well reaped harvest of $7,000,000” (92). Yet these economic boons come at a steep cost for the sailors who make them possible. The professional risks to whalers are readily apparent from the earliest pages of the novel even before the Pequod puts to sea, as when, in the fourth chapter, “The Chapel,” Ishmael describes the cenotaphs that line the Nantucket chapel while awaiting Father Mapple’s tempestuous sermon. This point is further driven home in “The Affidavit” when Ishmael claims that while most men have some vague, flitting ideas of the general perils of the grand fishery, yet they have nothing like a fixed, vivid conception of those perils, and the frequency with which they recur … I tell you that upon one particular voyage which I made to the Pacific, among many others, we spoke thirty different ships, every one of which had had a death by a whale, some of them more than one, and three that had each lost a boat’s crew. (164) The ecotechnological machinery that produces the whale oil that fires, illuminates, and lubricates the expanding machinery of industrialization, and which yields such hefty profits, then, is itself lubricated not a little by the lives of whalers. The dangerous frictions which Ishmael describes as part and parcel of the whaling industry are smoothed out in no small way by the blood of those who labor within it, a point that Ishmael underscores when he implores his reader “For God’s sake, be economical with your lamps and candles! not a gallon you burn but at least one drop of man’s blood was spilled for it” (164). The apparent efficiency of whaling and the profits that it produces are achieved only at a steep price for the men who undertake it. Itis a system whose production is predicated upon violence, not only to whales but also to whalers. Despite the high risks associated with it, the profits of whaling do not accrue to the sailors themselves but rather to the owners of the vessel. Melville details the corporate nature of the Pequod, noting that Captains Bildad and Peleg are only “the largest owners of the vessel; the other shares, as is sometimes the case in these ports, being held by a crowd of old annuitants; widows, fatherless children, and chancery wards; each owning about the value of a timber head, or a foot of plank, or a nail or two in the ship” (68). Starbuck, the chief mate, continually reminds Ahab that they must hunt for whales to ensure the financial security of these owners in Nantucket. In this way, the Pequod becomes enmeshed within a global economic system as well as a local economy, as a financial instrument as well as a seafaring vessel. The ship is, for better or worse, a corporate venture, and Starbuck’s assessment of Ahab’s pursuit of Moby-Dick, like that of any good executive officer, is frequently framed within a context of what amounts to corporate responsibility to stockholders. The Pequod, then, is not merely another node, but also a manifestation of this economic system, a joint stock company with dividends and employee profit sharing in the form of the “lays” offered to each member of the crew. This financial focus situates Moby-Dick firmly within an economic system that, through the tension between Ahab and Starbuck over their responsibility to the owners, shapes the trajectory of the story even as it illuminates the fiduciary elements of the whaling industry. The existence of the ship, the labor of the sailors, and the decision to put Ahab in command of the vessel are rooted at least partly in financial considerations. Both whaling fleets and, by extension, the novel are only made possible by the economic forces within the socio-ecological system that Melville depicts, by the global trade in whale oil and its importance in the development of industrial technologies. In addition to the commercial elements of the whaling, Melville also details the broader cultural forces that shape the whaling industry and the actions of Ahab and his crew. Whaling is interwoven with a wide variety of cultural elements including legal systems, artistic representation, and even mythology and lore (the sort of which Moby Dick is now a part). The novel’s participation in this tradition is made clear in the “Extracts” that open the book. Compiled by a “sub-sub-librarian” (presumably the analog of a graduate research assistant), these eighty extracts are quotations about whales or whaling drawn from a wide variety of sources ranging from the Bible to Milton and Shakespeare to Blackstone and Darwin. They indicate, from the very first, that Moby-Dick is engaged with a long tradition of writing concerning whales. They serve to enmesh the entirety of the story that follows and the entire system of whaling that Melville depicts, within broader cultural traditions and systems. These cultural touchstones are everywhere in the novel and, at one point, Ishmael even goes so far as to point out that whale oil is used in “the coronation of kings and queens, even modern ones” (95), saying “Think of that, ye loyal Britons! we whalemen supply your kings and queens with coronation stuff” (96). Whaling’s cultural enmeshment becomes particularly clear where Ishmael discusses the proper representation of whales within art. In his effort to help his readers visualize whales within the story, Ishmael addresses inaccurate depictions of whales, arguing that “It is time to set the world right in this matter, by proving such pictures of the whale all wrong” (205). He proceeds to detail the inaccuracies of romanticized depictions of whales across a variety of cultures from ancient Greece and the “cavern pagoda of Elephanta, in India” (205) to the plates within Captain Colnett’s “A Voyage around Cape Horn into the South Seas, for the purpose of extending the Spermaceti Whale Fisheries” (206). He details mistakes in size, anatomy, and identification, admitting to the difficulty that most artists and naturalists face in attempting to adequately observe whales while simultaneously condemning their representations. He then offers better examples such as those offered by Garney and by J. Ross Browne which “are pretty correct in contour,” though “they are wretchedly engraved” (209) and Ishmael laments that “you must needs conclude that the great Leviathan is that one creature in the world which must remain unpainted to the last” (208). Though Ishmael acknowledges that there is a degree of ultimate unfathomability to whales, he nevertheless argues that it is important to dispel any inaccurate images within the imagination of the reader and acknowledges the degree that whaling had embedded itself within popular culture. Though it may be hard to imagine today, when most people are either indifferent to or only mildly concerned with the process of acquiring oil, during the nineteenth century, people were “deeply immersed in the adventure of [whale oil’s] acquisition. As a commodity, whale oil was sold using the romantic danger of whaling as a marketing strategy that actively promoted its harrowing intrigue” (Scott 6). Romanticized images of whales were pervasive during this period and had, as Scott suggests, a dual message: “(1) these goods were acquired through a remote, dangerous, and deadly encounter between courageous and predatory man and mighty whale; (2) The whale’s blubber is now available in bottles and candles for your convenient purchase above Arch 37 in the wharves of Philadelphia” (11). In these ways, from economics to art to advertisements, the system of whaling pervaded and shaped culture both on land and at sea and Melville documents these intersections and influences, acknowledging them and, at times, trying to correct them in an attempt to fully represent all aspects of the system of whaling. Ishmael also devotes significant space to discussing the science of cetology, addressing himself to the problem that “the sperm whale, scientific or poetic, lives not complete in any literature” (110). Discussions of the science of whaling and the relative validity and creditability of certain natural scientists appear frequently throughout the book, notably in Chapter 32, “Cetology,” where Ishmael suggests that an intimate understanding of the science of whales is a prerequisite to embarking upon the voyage as “ere the Pequod’s weedy hull rolls side by side with the barnackled hulls of the Leviathan; at the outset it is but well to attend to a matter almost indispensable to a thorough appreciative understanding of the more special leviathanic revelations and allusions of all sorts which are to follow” (109). What follows amounts to a literature review of the existing scholarship on whaling, a consideration of scientific sources, both ancient and modern, in which Ishmael ultimately concludes that the works of Bennet and Beale are the “only two books in being which at all pretend to put the living sperm whale before you, and at the same time, in the remotest degree succeed in the attempt” (110). This review effectively places Ishmael in conversation with a variety of scholarly sources on the topic of cetacean biology and taxonomy. “Cetology” is structured not unlike an academic article, moving from the literature review into his specific focus: the taxonomy of whales. Ishmael proceeds to construct a system of classification for whales based on their relative size, sorting them into folio, octavo, and duodecimo categories—a self-referential gesture to the various sizes of paper used in publishing. Ishmael then proceeds to detail each member of each category, describing something of their biology and their behavior, as well as the relative quantities and qualities of oil that they produce. As Schultz suggests, “Ishmael, as a result of his later cetological explorations, reveals his more mature consciousness that the whale is indeed inscrutable, ‘beyond all utterance,’ beyond definite human comprehension” (99). Despite Ishmael’s system being “more complete, earnest, and organized in the study of the variety of whales than anything included, quite genuinely, in most of the sources published at the time” (King 47), much of the life of the whale remains unknowable and mysterious and Ishmael’s bibliographic classification system, indeed the whole novel remains “but a draught—nay, but the draught of a draught” (118). For all his knowledge and reading about whales in the aftermath of the events that are described within the novel, there is much that remains alien and unknown. This and other chapters on the biology and habits of the whale balance a wealth of information and firsthand experience with the acknowledgement that “As yet, however, the sperm whale, scientific or poetic, lives not complete in any literature. Far above all other hunted whales, his is an unwritten life” (110). There is a persistent tension between the known and the unknown or unknowable within the novel. Where there is clearly a sufficient amount known about whales to facilitate their continued hunt, even to predict the path of a specific sperm whale, there is always something that lives beyond the knowledge of both Ahab and even Ishmael. This unknowability is a friction in the ecotechnological system. It is a limitation in knowledge and understanding that represents a similar limitation in control as Ishmael illustrates, to an extent that Ahab never grasps that whaling is a system predicated less on human ingenuity than on biology itself. Along similar lines, one of the more pressing implications that Melville explores is the danger posed to the whale population. Ishmael devotes the whole of Chapter 105, “Does the Whale’s Magnitude Diminish? Will He Perish?,” to this issue, asking: Whether owing to the almost omniscient look-outs and mast-heads of the whale-ships, now penetrating even though Behring’s straits, and into the remotest secret drawers and lockers of the world; and the thousand harpoons and lances darted along all continental coasts; the moot point is, whether Leviathan can long endure so wide a chase, and so remorseless a havoc; whether he must not at last be exterminated from the waters, and the last whale, like the last man, smoke his last pipe, and then himself evaporate in the final puff. (337) Ishmael digs deeply into this question, beginning with a consideration of the trajectory of whales from their first appearance in the fossil record, arguing that, “not only are the whales of the present day superior in magnitude to those whose fossil remains are found in the Tertiary system (embracing a distinct geological period prior to man)” and that “of the whales found in that Tertiary system, those belonging to its latter formation exceed in size those of its earlier ones” (337). He then moves forward in time, discounting the exaggerated claims of Pliny and other “ancient naturalists” to focus on “comparing the humped herds of whales with the humped herds of buffalo, which, not forty years ago, overspread by tens of thousands the prairies of Illinois and Missouri, and shook their iron manes and scowled with their thunder-clotted brows upon the sites of populous river-capitals” (338), suggesting that “in such a comparison an irresistible argument would seem furnished, to show that the hunted whale cannot now escape speedy extinction” (338). Ishmael then dismisses this analogy, suggesting that “the far different nature of the whale-hunt peremptorily forbids so inglorious an end to the Leviathan” (338) and arguing that the ultimate ability of whales to retreat to their “Polar citadels” ensures that “the whale is immortal in his species, however perishable in his individuality” (339). Schultz has argued, that, despite Ishmael’s supposed certainty about the permanence of whales and Moby-Dick’s ultimate survival, “Melville’s vision of whales as possibly ‘perishable’ represents his profound anxiety for this species as well as for all life” (107). Whether Ishmael’s logic is read as rational or rationalization, the acknowledgement of the possibility of anthropogenic extinction illustrates one of the most profound aspects of his thinking about the world ecology in which he is participating: its limitations. While there is certainly some question about the whether or not Ishmael’s facts could indeed be “statistically stated” (338), the very fact that Ishmael raises the question at all acknowledges possibility that whaling might prove unsustainable. If, indeed, the remaining whales of the earth were to fall back to their frozen fortresses, the whaling industry would cease to exist. Regardless of the validity of his conclusions concerning the imperishability of whales, in integrating fossil records, ancient accounts, and records of the decimation of other species, Melville underscores the vulnerability not just of individual species but of the whole ecotechnological system. Though Ishmael’s archeological credentials leave much to be desired, in tracing cetological evolution back into the fossil record, including a detailed analysis of cetacean fossils found in Paris, Antwerp, and Alabama, he creates a contrast between the ecological stability of the fossil record and the literal sea changes that he confronts in his own moment. Though Ishmael may fail to comprehend the full, deadly potential of the whaling industry, it’s clear that he grasps both the changes that it has wrought and the ways in which it threatens its own long-term existence. Melville is attentive not just to the nature of whaling as an ecotechnological system, but also to the ways in which it operates within a larger world-ecology, one defined by a wide variety of socio-ecological factors. This single story is bound up in a mythological tradition, in a complex set of biological systems and cultural traditions, and in emergent global economic systems. This means that, though, as Marx points out, Moby-Dick “begins with the hero’s urge to withdraw from a repressive civilization” (351), no such withdrawal is possible; Ishmael’s efforts only serve to enmesh him more tightly within the systems of that repressive society. It is not possible to “opt out” of world-ecology. This is realized in retrospect, as Ishmael charts the various systems that he found himself enmeshed in on the Pequod and it underscores the degree to which, even in the nineteenth century and even in the remotest regions of the world, humans were unable to escape their complicity in these emergent global systems. This enmeshment is reflected even in the form of the novel itself, as the narration weaves back and forth between the plot and informational elements. The plot is textually enmeshed within socio-ecological description just as Ishmael and all the rest are enmeshed within the ecological, cultural, and economic systems of whaling. Though Melville may have been the only one to map out the systems and implications of whaling, he was hardly alone in offering a systematic approach to natural environments in the nineteenth century, or in his concern about their deleterious effects. Melville continually situates the book within a much larger historical and literary tradition but the extent of the web within which Moby-Dick is woven only becomes apparent throughout the course of the novel. It is a web of human and nonhuman systems that ensnares the reader in ways resonant with Donna Haraway’s figure for tentacular thinking, the spider Pimoa cthulu (Staying with the Trouble 31). The web that Melville weaves makes manifest the connections between what Haraway calls natureculture—which, for Melville includes nature, technology, culture, and capital (The Companion Species Manifesto 3). The interleaving of plot and information, while organizationally disorienting, continually reorients the reader within the plot, providing readers with mental course corrections to help them navigate the global systems within which the plot occurs. This approach is well suited to attempting understand and interpret the environmental crisis that is the Anthropocene—a term usually traced back to a 2000 article by Paul Crutzen and Eugene Stoermer. Indeed, such thinking was part and parcel of larger movements in nineteenth-century natural science as, according to Bonneuil and Fressoz, during this period, scientists began to perceive nature as an “economy” that was “pervaded by connections, chains of dependence and reciprocities,” where “catastrophe always threatened” (Bonneuil and Fressoz 180). In Moby-Dick Melville integrates these chains of dependence and reciprocity into the plot of the novel, tracing the connections for readers and bringing to the fore all the relationships and interconnections that underly the plot. Catastrophe and World-Ecology Moby-Dick is a novel of catastrophe. The catastrophic event of the novel—the destruction of the Pequod and all Ishmael’s shipmates by Moby Dick—represents an implosion of the ecotechnological system, a failure of technology to contain ecology. Though the catastrophic nature of the story only becomes clear in the final pages, the whole novel is retrospective, recounting each step toward the crew’s demise. It is a reckoning of a catastrophe that has already occurred, accounting for both the Pequod’s inexorable progress towards its destruction and its place within the systems that shape its end. It is a novel of the aftermath, one that describes a path toward ultimate destruction, not just through the events within the plot, but also through a description of the major contextual forces that shape those events. In this sense it is really a re-reading of the story, an augmented—even annotated—retrospective that integrates Ishmael’s first-hand experience with a great deal of supplemental research to tell more fully the story not only of the Pequod but also of the socio-ecological systems in which it operates. It is a novel that attempts, though imperfectly and incompletely, to understand and attend to the external factors and influences that helped to shape the events of the story. Schultz emphasizes that “Melville does not in fact conclude the chronological narrative of Moby-Dick with the survival of Ishmael and Moby Dick” (110). The text, instead, continues with Ishmael traveling “geographically, culturally, and literarily—to learn what he can about life and nature, whales and human beings. In doing so, he implicitly recognizes human dependency on technology” (Schultz 110). It is the education that he receives in the aftermath of the catastrophe than provides Ishmael with the knowledge and means to strive to represent and come to cultural, ecological, historical—and textual—terms with it. In documenting the factors—both aboard the Pequod and beyond it—that led to the Pequod’s destruction, Melville offers a broader, more inclusive story, one that tells the story of his own adventure while also documenting the ecotechnological systems that helped to shape it, and which continue to have an impact through the current moment. Ishmael’s systematic approach traces the interplay between the events of the novel and the systems within which it operates, illustrating the relationship between the characters in the novel and the larger networks in which they consciously and unconsciously participate. This is not to say that Melville anticipated our current environmental crisis nor that the ecotechnological elements within the novel should be read as a form of technological determinism. Though E. M. Forster did refer to Moby-Dick as a “prophetic song” (Forster 200), the difference between the nineteenth-century whaling industry and the twenty-first century fossil fuel industry is one of many order of magnitude. Indeed, The amount of whale oil produced in the United States during the heyday of whaling, the whole nineteenth century, would fit in about four loads of a really big supertanker. The tens of thousands of men, the hundreds of ships, the decades and centuries of sailing to the ends of the Earth to mine whales from the oceans, the thrills and art and tragedy and suffering, all of it produced an amount of oil in one century that would not supply modern US imports for one day (Alley 36). With his geological credentials of having been “a stone-mason, and also a great digger of ditches, canals and wells, wine-vaults, cellars, and cisterns of all sorts” (334), we might well questions Ishmael’s ability to foresee the impacts of modern fossil fuel extraction and the human impact on the geologic record. Yet, despite Ishmael’s inability to foresee the scope of our modern ecotechnological dynamos, Moby-Dick still has much to offer in terms of approaching and understanding the essential relationship between the human culture and economic systems and the environment. Though Ishmael claims that “this whole book is but a draught—nay, but the draught of a draught” (118), he does manage to provide the outlines the socio-ecological systems that the crew of the Pequod navigates. These socio-ecological relationships that are developed in the cetological chapters serve as the basis for what Elizabeth Schultz refers to as Moby-Dick’s “environmental vision with a conscience” (Schultz 100). They are in the story, but never really of it, and through them Ishmael demonstrates a deep, if necessarily incomplete, understanding of the environmental implication of the whaling industry. The environmental vision that is developed through these chapters is not just one with a conscience, but one that conscientiously and continuously integrates the elements of the world ecology in which it participates. In Moby-Dick, readers encounter Ishmael triangulating the Pequod not just geographically, but historically and ecologically. His reading of the socio-ecological elements of whaling is woven into his main narrative and, in telling this story, this novel offers one model of how one might attempt to triangulate themselves in our current ecological crisis. Just as Ishmael draws upon contemporary science, deep history, cultural representations, and economic factors to “read” and describe his place within the global system of whaling, so too can we look to Moby-Dick to help us help illuminate our current moment. Though the modern fossil fuel economy dwarfs that of nineteenth-century whaling by many orders of magnitude, both are extractive energy strategies and whaling grew out of and responded to industrializing and globalizing forces that helped to shape our current economy, culture, and environment. Whaling was shaped by the accretion of a variety of factors that built up over long periods of time and in many places and which were shaped by scientific and industrial advancement, culture and history, economic imperatives and concerns about labor—factors that continue to shape contemporary world-ecology and individual and collective lives. As a novel that attends to the world-ecology in which its plot evolves, Moby-Dick guides readers not just through the plot, but also through a nascent global economy; through the history of whaling, both ancient and modern, and through what were, at the time of its publication, some of the most cutting edge research on marine biology. It is not a historical or ecological textbook but rather a novel that that draws upon an exhaustive amount of research in order to more fully understand itself. In doing so, it rejects neat distinctions between science and culture, nature and technology, fiction and history, and instead embraces the tensions and overlap between them. Ishmael tells the story of a whaleship but also a story about whaling as an industry. His narrative overflows with information and trivia about whales even as it acknowledges the unknowability of whales and their environment. He exhaustively (and sometimes exhaustingly) cites authorities on whaling, but doesn’t hesitate to dismiss scientific expertise where he feels it appropriate. Moby-Dick isa novel of interrelationship that moves between scales and across time with a rapidity and fluidity that are equal parts informative and confusing for a first-time reader. In other words, it’s an ideal novel of the Anthropocene. It charts the relationship between human and nonhuman, between individual and system in ways that make interrelationships and interdependencies explicit. In reflecting on our collective future, Dipesh Chakrabarty has suggested, that “many of us still approach the problem of global warming armed only with weapons forged in times when globalization (of media, capital) seemed to be the key issue for the world” (25). We are, in other words, a bit like Ahab forging the harpoon whose line would eventually drag him to his death, continuously creating tools that are as likely to contribute to our destruction as to salvation. In Moby-Dick, Melville offers a different approach. He blends fact and fiction to tell multiple stories, on multiple scales, in a systematic way. The core of the novel—the story of Pequod’s crew—is enmeshed with a systematic exploration of the world-ecology in which it occurs. The narrative thread of the novel is interwoven with the chapters about nearly every aspect of whaling and a larger pattern emerges. It becomes nautical fiction embedded within economic systems and engaged with ecology and the human and the nonhuman, the natural and the technological begin to blend into one another, not least in the figure of the Pequod itself. Ishmael models a method of reading and of telling stories that has interconnectedness built into its very structure at every stage. The ship, while trolling some of the remotest seas on the planet, is never isolated. The novel is fictitious, but it is also more than fiction and it leverages both fact and fiction to tell a story at a variety of scales, an approach that is uniquely suited to making sense of global systems, of world-ecology, and of catastrophe. It does not offer a key to salvation—Marx reminds that “Melville does not exaggerate the saving power of this complex, literary vision. It may account for the rescue of one man, but it is powerless to save the ship” (319)—but it does offer the possibility of greater clarity and understanding, of strategies to better understand our own relationship to our current world-ecology. In his description of the Spouter Inn in the opening of the third chapter of the novel, Ishmael discusses a peculiar feature of the inn, “a very large oil painting so thoroughly besmoked, and every way defaced, that in the unequal cross-lights by which you viewed it, it was only by diligent study and a series of systematic visits to it, and careful inquiry of the neighbors, that you could any way arrive at an understanding of its purpose.” A “boggy, soggy, squitchy picture truly,” it may represent an attempt to “delineate chaos bewitched” or perhaps “the Black Sea in a midnight gale.” As we work to understand a planet and societies that are similarly besmoked and defaced, the systematic, encyclopedic elements within Moby-Dick allow the reader to follow Ishmael through his attempts to make sense of his experience in an emergent ecotechnological system at the leading edge of the Anthropocene in the same way they can follow his attempt to decipher the painting in the Spouter. The Anthropocene is a boggy, soggy world, one full of chaotic technology, but by approaching the stories that we tell about it systematically, like Ishmael, by making careful inquiry of many disciplines, and by acknowledging that our understanding is but a draft of a draft, readers may begin to chart out its boundaries, fuzzy as they are, and our own place within their bounds. ACKNOWLEDGEMENT I would like to thank Laura Hayes, Eric Gidal, and Naomi Greyser for their thoughtful comments and feedback on earlier drafts of this essay. Notes Developed from Richard White's conception of organic machines in his 1996 The Organic Machine: The Remaking of the Columbia River, the concept of ecotechnological systems involves the integration of technology and environment for human ends. For more information on the history and development of the concept across different environments, see Thomas Parke Hughes' The Human Built World: How to Think about Technology and Culture, William Cronon's Nature's Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West, and Andrew Needham's Power Lines: Phoenix and the Making of the American Southwest. Footnotes 1 Notes Developed from Richard White’s conception of organic machines in his 1996 The Organic Machine: The Remaking of the Columbia River, the concept of ecotechnological systems involves the integration of technology and environment for human ends. For more information on the history and development of the concept across different environments, see Thomas Parke Hughes’ The Human Built World: How to Think about Technology and Culture, William Cronon’s Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West, and Andrew Needham’s Power Lines: Phoenix and the Making of the American Southwest. Works Cited Alley Richard B. Earth: The Operator’s Manual . 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TI - Melville’s Novel Mechanisms: Charting Anthropocene Systems in Moby-Dick
JF - ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment
DO - 10.1093/isle/isaa133
DA - 2020-10-25
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EP - 1480
VL - 28
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DP - DeepDyve
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