Chapter 3
Mark D. Noble
In today’s classrooms, as in Moby-Dick, Ahab often trails the phantom of his own celebrity. First-time readers expect displays of tragic magna nimity, or some hubris we can believe in, or a villain worth vanquishing. Many are surprised to find a leaky despot prone to sullen moods and obscure speeches who stumbles and breaks his prosthetic leg, whose vengeful preoccupation sounds more like a personal affliction than a Promethean crusade, and whose gravitas owes more to Ishmael’s hype or Father Mapple’s opening set than to “the nameless regal overbearing dignity of some mighty woe.”1 As the indignity rises to the surface, it can be hard not to feel a pang of worried sympathy for Ahab, as Ishmael does after first hearing of him. My students find him more an instrument of the plot than a person, confirming Ishmael’s worst fears. His prophecies seem altogether silly, and his remonstrations come off as desperate. In the end, that sleepy speech in “The Symphony” that sunders the “natural heart” from adherence to a “fixed purpose” seems to loom over everything that comes before (545).
From the moment he nails his coin to the mast, in other words, Ahab looks less like the bastion of concentrated power he claims to be and more like a device for troubling the idea that power could be a function of human agency. We might say that Ahab’s agenda brings the question of personal agency into focus—that his example sheds a dubious light on our faith in parables of self-determination. But this also means acknowledging how often that question slips right back out of focus and into the novel’s various corporeal transformations. The resulting tension can make the novel seem at odds with itself. Melville repeatedly de-exceptionalizes human claims to agential powers, dispersing agency from the self to the world, and yet so much in Moby-Dick depends on Ahab’s gigantic volition. The plot and the Pequod’s crew, for all their inebriate oath taking and impromptu squeezing, both adhere to his weird magnetism. His baroque monologues, whether quarrelsome or contemplative, almost always arrive at questions about the limits of individual autonomy. Scholars continue debating whether his strident humanism better reflects liberal democratic norms or totalitarian exceptions to those norms.2 Even the penetrative hermeneutics underwriting his disastrous quest are said to depend on Ahab’s “sheer inveteracy of will”—a conceit which the novel elsewhere disbelieves (202).
In hopes of rethinking the link between Ahab’s dogged resolution and the novel’s dissolution of his claims, this essay revisits the two main threads comprising Moby-Dick’s account of Ahab’s obsolescence: (1) those moments in which agency slips away from or manifests outside the self, and (2) the series of debates with Starbuck about what fixes the purpose of laboring bodies aboard his ship. I find that aligning such moments helps illustrate Melville’s curiosity about what links the appeal of materialist ontologies to the features of modern political economy. Consider, for instance, Ahab’s famous assertion that a principle of agential “fair play” underwrites his calamitous project. In the illustration he offers, “fair play” means one could trade insults with the sun, if it came to that.3 It also means grounding political arguments about the sovereignty of the self on an ontological presumption that selves and celestial bodies are powered by common energies. Improbable as the political part of that argument sounds, tracking its twists and turns in Moby-Dick helps characterize Ahab’s intransigence: he draws power from an immanent plane as if to transcend the system of relations from which such power flows.
Of course he fails every time. But Ahab’s problem is not simply that he has too little of the agential power needed to contend for sovereignty on a playing field Ishmael calls the “howling infinite” (107). His problem is also that agency depends on febrile embodiments that threaten the coherence of agential claims. In the first part of what follows, I return to moments in “The Chart” and “The Candles” that diagnose this problem. Such moments both demonstrate and devastate Ahab’s assumption that a “fixed purpose” could generate ontopolitical power, not least because agency turns out to be less a privilege of concentrated selfhood than a by-product of material linkages and tensions—those between humans and those that transgress human boundaries.
But I also find that tracking materialist disintegrations of agency from the self in which we like to think it resides gets me only part of the way to an account of why Ahab’s agency matters. The second part of this essay thus revisits his dispute with Starbuck over the meaning of the Pequod’s collective labor. Each time Starbuck reminds him that purpose flows from market relations, Ahab insists that his special intensity stands apart from the logic of capital. As a consequence, his effort to reframe ontological connections as theological contests reflects an implicit belief that what makes labor valuable must not be legible in economic terms. The primitive obduracy of attachments to personal power might be less about eschewing material attachments, to which Ahab eventually concedes, than about wishing away the political economy that determines their shape and delimits their meaning.
So I wonder whether it matters that Ahab’s assertion of individuated agency, however futile in the end, fashions the novel’s only explicit model of political resistance to commodified agency. As Ishmael’s cetological adventures and corporeal enchantments remind us, Ahab’s concessions to Starbuck do not mean that material relations are necessarily capitalist relations. But the question does come up. Their debates about the “fixed purpose” of laboring bodies suggest that, for Melville in 1851, Ahab’s atavistic exceptionalism—his madness deepened into fleeting concentrations of power—seemed the only plausible last gasp of resistance to a political economy that contends with no alternatives. Is that why I worry?
•••
Ahab’s sleepwalking episode in “The Chart” remains one of Melville’s most frequently discussed exposures of human agency to the instability of agential claims. The scene occurs at the very end of an extraordinary day on board the Pequod, one that begins with Ahab’s speech in “The Quarter-Deck” and includes his aching soliloquies in “Sunset” and “Dusk,” the genre-bending theatrics of “Midnight, Forecastle,” and Ishmael’s expansive essays on “Moby Dick” and “The Whiteness of the Whale.” Each of those moments reflects the galvanizing effects of the quarterdeck ritual, which summons a “nameless, interior volition” used to shock into Ahab’s crew “the same fiery emotion accumulated within the Leyden jar of his own magnetic life” (165). The force of that shock reverberates throughout the musical numbers and metaphysical acrobatics comprising the subsequent chapters. When the captain then storms out of his stateroom in the middle of the night, Chapter 44 thus makes a peculiar bookend to the novel’s early anatomy of Ahab’s agency. The sleepwalking episode matters, in other words, because it reveals that the elements comprising his Leyden-jar self are fissile materials far more turbulent than anyone seemed to notice while toasting vengeance in the morning.
Back in Chapter 41, which begins as a cultural history of the White Whale but becomes an etiology of Ahab’s monomania, Ishmael proposes that madness intensifies as a river deepens: “Ahab’s full lunacy subsided not, but deepeningly contracted; like the unabated Hudson, when that noble Northman flows narrowly, but unfathomably through the Highland gorge.” The analogy includes a typically Ishmaelean convolution: the contours of a personal affliction (monomania) recall an instance of fluvial geology (“the unabated Hudson”) itself analogous to personhood (“that noble Northman”). It also proposes that Ahab’s fixation should be understood as a deepening or condensation of psychic energies that elsewhere flow in shallower streams; trauma has enhanced his potency “a thousand fold” by converting natural intellect to ammunition for a “concentred cannon” trained on a single purpose (185). “The Chart” complicates this depth model of Ahabian agency by particularizing the components, internal to the self but not necessarily restricted to the self, that generate the magnetic power said to flow from attachment to a fixed purpose.
We’re told the Pequod’s captain is both not himself and most himself when he flees from his cabin, as if escaping the “intolerably vivid dreams” and “clashing of phrensies” whirling in a “blazing brain.” On the one hand, the man that appears on deck is explicitly not Ahab—not our familiarly “crazy Ahab, the scheming, unappeasedly steadfast hunter of the white whale.” On the other hand, such an appearance is so Ahab. Only the monomaniac overheats his own engine until it detaches from an otherwise sane self, driving the body as if without a mind. And so the thing that leaps from his hammock “as though escaping from a bed that was on fire” is not the Ahab who had gone to bed. What appears is rather the symptom of a dissociative break, or the vehicle driven by a “tormented spirit” in flight from “the characterizing mind” that yokes it every day—a body in motion and yet a body animated by a “living principle” making its “escape from the scorching contiguity of the frantic thing” (201–2).
Part of what makes the scene so striking is not just the idea that an overworked soul rebels against the mind, but the much weirder discovery that one’s inner “agents” can seize a heated moment and represent themselves. Again, the official story is that the hostile takeover of Ahab’s body by Ahab’s burning soul must be the product of his uncommon willfulness, because longing for Moby Dick has created, within his self, a panicked volition that cannot but take the reins. Stranger still, the internal pressures that come with so much “narrow-flowing” (185) intensity force a change of state in which a mere attribute of character operates as if it too were an autonomous thing:
But as the mind does not exist unless leagued with the soul, therefore it must have been that, in Ahab’s case, yielding up all his thoughts and fancies to his one supreme purpose; that purpose, by its own sheer inveteracy of will, forced itself against gods and devils into a kind of self-assumed, independent being of its own.
The emergence of this new agential polyp (for which Ishmael offers first “living principle,” then “soul,” then “supreme purpose,” and finally “tormented spirit”) implies that flowing so narrowly risks fission in the self. What now drives Ahab’s still sleeping body scarcely resembles any part of the person:
[It] could grimly live and burn, while the common vitality to which it was conjoined, fled horror-stricken from the unbidden and unfathered birth. Therefore, the tormented spirit that glared out of bodily eyes, when what seemed Ahab rushed from his room, was for the time but a vacated thing, a formless somnambulistic being, a ray of living light, to be sure, but without an object to color, and therefore a blankness in itself. (202)
Glaring from behind the eyes, the unchained agent seems less a property of the human than an elemental substance of its own—a “vacated thing” reminiscent of the strange materiality assigned to whiteness in “The Whiteness of the Whale.” This is not diminished agency exactly, but something more like herniated agency—or what Jean-Étienne Esquirol, coining “monomania” circa 1814, called “a lesion of the will.”4 When the fugitive soul sets fire to the bed, in other words, Ahab looks less like an avatar of self-determination than a victim of its presumption, less a magnet charged by fixed purpose than a casualty of the idea that agency could be safely located in the self.
In his classic reading of “The Chart,” Jonathan Arac calls these disintegrated definitions of Ahab’s character “involuted paradoxes of agency.”5 The paradox lies in the fact that intensifications of personal power reveal such power to be elemented of materials that exceed the personal. As Melville insists in “The Chart,” this is not because Ahab has too little of the magnetic charge he needs: what might look like “latent weakness, or fright at his own resolve” (his “wild cry” and “glaring eyes”) are in fact “the plainest tokens of its intensity” (202). But in this case the proof of such intensity disarticulates agency from the self in which it is embodied. Ahab’s problem is not simply that his powers might be insufficient to the task of hunting one demon within an ocean of similar bodies; his problem is rather that agency cannot be said to adhere exclusively or even especially to the self that relies upon it.
It is worth recalling that this particular dissociative moment follows a long night spent poring over logbooks and navigational charts, “threading a maze of currents and eddies, with a view to the more certain accomplishment of that monomaniac thought of his soul.” Ahab studies the “unhooped oceans of this planet” into the early hours of the morning with an “unloitering vigilance” that risks blurring the distinction between the man and the maps. In the unsteady light of a cabin lamp, he charts the whale “till it almost seemed that while he himself was marking out lines and courses on the wrinkled charts, some invisible pencil was also tracing lines and courses upon the deeply marked chart of his forehead” (198). Because no degree of concentration could be adequate to the immensity and variability of the world the charts represent, the solitary effort to pinpoint one whale belonging to several oceans eventually subsumes the man tracing the lines. When Ahab’s brow, furrowed and “unappeasable” as Moby Dick’s, becomes an instance of the text he scores, “The Chart” anticipates the sleepwalking episode that erupts from its final paragraphs. Reading so intensely before bed transforms the reader into an instance of the object read; then, later that night, attachment to a “fixed purpose” unfixes purpose from the self. To put this another way, Ahab’s unwitting discovery, as he burns midnight oil extracted from bodies he hunts on paper, is that the very idea of an intense specificity or concentration of the will actually sponsors the identic slippage that sets his hammock on fire. For all his solipsism, and no matter how hard he studies, Ahab is agency come undone from the self.
But “The Chart” is far from the end of the story about Ahab’s agential powers. Rather, Moby-Dick stages a series of contests in which Ahab’s “narrow-flowing” model of intensified agency succumbs to various widenings and dispersals. The most thrilling such contest occurs in “The Candles,” in which confronting a lightning storm recalls his earlier nightmare. Like the captain’s magnet, the “clear spirit of clear fire” atop the Pequod’s masts transfixes the bodies below. In a stunning moment just before Ahab takes the stage, Saint Elmo’s fire illuminates the crew in terms that recall the “ray of living light” escaping Ahab in “The Chart”:
While this pallidness was burning aloft, few words were heard from the enchanted crew; who in one thick cluster stood on the forecastle, all their eyes gleaming in that pale phosphorescence, like a far away constellation of stars. Relieved against the ghostly light, the gigantic jet negro, Daggoo, loomed up to thrice his real stature, and seemed the black cloud from which the thunder had come. The parted mouth of Tashtego revealed his shark-white teeth, which strangely gleamed as if they too had been tipped by corpusants; while lit up by the preternatural light, Queequeg’s tattooing burned like Satanic blue flames on his body. (506)
These are bodies illuminated from without, while Ahab’s fugitive soul is said to burn from within. And the harpooners’ transformations betray an unsettling racial imaginary—reducing them to size, teeth, and skin, rather than Ahab’s magic battery or Leyden jar. And yet this passage dares to propose eliding such distinctions, not least by transforming corporeal elements into meteorological elements: eyes into phosphorescent starlight, stature into storm cloud, teeth into burning plasma, tattoos into fire. The implicit threat to Ahab is both political and personal. Not only does the storm usurp his hold on the crew, lighting them with a greater magnetic potency than his Leyden jar could, but it also rehearses the terrifying idea that one’s inner vitality might be atomized and dispersed, decanted from the body and absorbed by the world.
But Ahab stands his ground. His heroic refusal contends that the sovereignty of a “queenly personality” cannot be subsumed by lightning or made subject to a bigger magnet without the consent of the governed. Such an insurgency cites the natural rights of the individual even as it acknowledges that what powers any individual also exceeds its boundaries: “No fearless fool now fronts thee. I own thy speechless, placeless power; but to the last gasp of my earthquake life will dispute its unconditional, unintegral mastery in me.” What makes this moment particularly striking for a discussion of elemental agency in Melville’s novel is just how incongruous the assertion of ownership sounds coming from someone whose living light also tends to revolt in the night. Shaking a Satanic fist at the sky means doubling down on earlier claims to a special purpose that charges his magnet, even while admitting that such energies also permeate the ambient meteor. Ahab acknowledges that the light above registers its effects in corporeal terms: “The lightning flashes through my skull; mine eye-balls ache and ache; my whole beaten brain seems as beheaded, and rolling on some stunning ground.” But recording such effects only corroborates his assumption that bodily experiences merely index “some unsuffusing thing beyond” embodiment—something toward which the fire, he guesses, makes its own defiant gesture. If the fire in the sky is yet another magnetic body in an upward arrangement of “pasteboard” agents, then defying its power also means recognizing one’s affinity with it: “Thou foundling fire, thou hermit immemorial, thou too hast thy incommunicable riddle, thy unparticipated grief” (507–8).
What happens if we take this claim seriously? What would it mean to propose that the mysterious lights atop the Pequod’s masts are, like Ahab, agents that contend with epistemological boundaries? Conversely, what if corpusants (to use Melville’s spelling) are also bodies animated by some fugitive element yoked to a “characterizing mind”? Ahab’s speech admits at least a couple of unwitting but intriguing options for thinking the corporeality of corpusants. An 1845 issue of the Penny Magazine, which Melville enjoyed, glosses Saint Elmo’s fire as explosive relations between invisibly smaller objects tangled in “highly excited opposite states.”6 The lights atop the masts are profane disturbances of an “electrical balance” between earth and sky, mere fugitive “particles of air” pressed into “what Dr. Faraday calls a disruptive discharge.”7 As in Ahab’s case, an eruption of light follows a material change of state. On the other hand, corpusants also transmit the sacred body of Erasmus of Formia (informally Elmo), a third-century Christian martyr famous for his adherence to Father Mapple’s preach truth to the face of falsehood dictum and for his several aborted executions, which included forced starvation, ritual immolation, and being enclosed in a barrel lined with spikes and then rolled down a hill. In the legend, Erasmus’s martyrdom was at last achieved circa 303 CE, when the Roman emperor Diocletian had him disemboweled with a windlass, unwinding his intestines using a version of the device that winds the anchor back into the Pequod. The presence of the windlass in subsequent iconography, and in several gruesome frescoes, accounts for Saint Elmo’s patronage of all mariners.8
This all amounts to a rather cruel twist. Ahab’s kinship with the lights in the sky refers neither to their respective positions on a common scale of agential powers nor to their mutual disdain for a “cozening, hidden lord” behind appearances. Rather, their affinity is that shared by every body vulnerable to the squeeze of immanence—susceptible, that is, to “disruptive discharges” of personal power, or the guts unwound from the body. Once again, Ahab’s dilemma is not just that he occupies a rung too low on the ladder of self-determination, nor is it that he believes the self to be organized otherwise than materially. Rather, he refuses to abide the flatness of a materialist ontology, even if that means staking everything on a claim to power that presumes stable alignments of unstable elements. Even worse, such elements transgress every boundary thought to distinguish the person. In such a nightmare, the wall through which the prisoner punches turns out to be integral, not merely oppositional, to the punch thrown. Or to put this another way: what flings Ahab from his bed is not really about what transcends his “speechless, placeless power”; rather, it is about the instability of a material substrate in which such power already swims—the “millions of mixed shades and shadows,” as Ishmael puts it, “drowned dreams, somnambulisms, reveries; all that we call lives and souls” (482). In a characteristic phrase, D. H. Lawrence attributes this recurrence of the somnambulistic reverie to Melville’s fascination with “the sheer naked slidings of the elements.”9 What so torments Ahab is the discovery that agency must be one such element and that what looks like adherence to a purpose “laid with iron rails” turns out to be the match that sets the self ablaze (168).
•••
In fairness to Ahab, linking his protest in “The Candles” to the motions of invisible particles and the disembowelment of Saint Elmo sounds a lot like something Ishmael would do. I don’t regret this, because tracing those Ishmaelean conjunctures does help illustrate the serial contest between Ahab’s presumption of concentrated agency and the material (re)distributions of agential bodies that preoccupies so much of the rest of Moby-Dick. But simply reproducing the sorts of speculative dalliances comprising the “mixed shades and shadows” of Ishmael’s ontology mostly dodges my question about why Ahab’s obsolescence matters. What would it mean to take his assertion of “fair play” seriously? And if his presumption that agency could be sutured to identity now looks oddly primitive, then what exactly makes his magnet so powerful?
By turning from “The Chart” to “The Candles,” I have suggested that the unconscious mutiny driving Ahab from his bed shares a materialist ontology, and even a corporeal homology, with his own self-conscious mutiny against the “personified impersonal” flickering from an electrical field. But what about the mutiny he quells? While positing a shared ontology coordinates the broader investments of Melville’s novel, it is worth recalling that it is Ahab’s dogged attachment to the “royal rights” of a “queenly personality” that shocks his crew into compliance (507). And it seems to matter that he achieves this by explicitly refusing (and then gradually acceding to) a system of economic relations that reduces actors to their networks. The most serious spin I can put on his claims to special agency, in other words, traces the shape of that resistance, for which Ahab draws on “narrow-flowing” energies he thinks he owns and which he unfolds most clearly during a series of debates with Starbuck about the meaning of their collective work (185).
Not long after his midnight encounter with the fissile materials comprising his own “tormented spirit,” Ahab offers a competing theory of agency founded on a more conventional stratification of the human subject. In “Surmises,” keeping the crew on board for a doomed vengeance quest relies on a model of personhood assembled from a specific hierarchy of attributes:
To accomplish his object Ahab must use tools; and of all tools used in the shadow of the moon, men are most apt to get out of order. He knew, for example, that however magnetic his ascendancy in some respects was over Starbuck, yet that ascendancy did not cover the complete spiritual man any more than the mere corporeal superiority involves intellectual mastership; for to the purely spiritual, the intellectual but stands in a sort of corporeal relation. (211–12)
In this accounting, power trickles down the person—or mastery over higher aspects of other selves grants access to the lower layers sedimented beneath. Intellectual enthrallment assures corporeal devotion; bewitch someone’s “purely spiritual” parts, and all her lower strata will be riveted to your purpose. While Stubb can be conventionally bullied, Starbuck, all “interior vitality” and “august dignity” (115–17), remains exceptional because his fixed devotional habits mean Ahab enters him only in the middle layer:
Starbuck’s body and Starbuck’s coerced will were Ahab’s, so long as Ahab kept his magnet at Starbuck’s brain; still he knew that for all this the chief mate, in his soul, abhorred his captain’s quest, and could he, would joyfully disintegrate himself from it, or even frustrate it. (212)
Thanks to his twin faiths in Quaker morality and Nantucket commerce, Starbuck does succumb to the mental magnet, for now. The coercion of those of Starbuck’s strata required for keeping him in line reflects a thesis that one person’s superiority over another can be measured on an axis stretching from the innermost to the uppermost conceit of individuated agency. For Ahab, in other words, political power obeys the logic assigned to “delight” in Father Mapple’s homily: like madness it flows “upward and inward,” accruing to the individual “who against the proud gods and commodores of the earth, ever stands forth his own inexorable self” (50).
Ahab remains “consumed with the hot fire of his purpose,” but Ishmael guesses that he also knows men will mutiny if “strictly held to the one final and romantic object.” The decision to lower for lesser whales than Moby Dick reflects a strategic grasp of the difference between his conceit of sovereign agency and their habituation to a steady paycheck:
I will not strip these men, thought Ahab, of all hopes of cash—aye, cash. They may scorn cash now; but let some months go by, and no perspective promise of it to them, and then this same quiescent cash all at once mutinying in them, this same cash would soon cashier Ahab.
The crew adheres to “quiescent cash” drawn from the conversion of whales’ bodies into fungible commodities—which is to say, from the transmutation of their labor into surplus value. To persuade himself, Ahab adds that while “playing round their savageness even breeds a certain generous knight-errantism” in the crew, that quixotic ideal has never really been a match for “more common, daily appetites.” Perhaps men have never been otherwise, since “even the high lifted and chivalric Crusaders of old times were not content to traverse two thousand miles of land to fight for their holy sepulchre, without committing burglaries, picking pockets, and gaining other pious perquisites by the way” (212–13). But when it comes to the crew of a Nantucket whaler in the final decades of the “high and mighty business of whaling” (109), Ahab never quite forgets that the requirements of capital impinge on his project. “The permanent constitutional condition of the manufactured man,” he concludes, “is sordidness” (212).
Ahab and Starbuck conduct versions of this negotiation several times throughout the novel. They rehearse it moments before the most quotable parts of “The Quarter-Deck” speech (“How many barrels will thy vengeance yield thee even if thou gettest it, Captain Ahab?” [163]); then in the implied dialogue from the mental magnet moment discussed above; then much later when Starbuck, staring down the barrel of Ahab’s musket, persuades the captain to hoist Burtons and address a leaky cask; and then once more during the intimate exchange in “The Symphony,” where the homeward promise of domestic bliss takes the place of “quiescent cash.” Throughout this subplot, Ahab’s attachment to his own mission implies autonomy from the industrial economy underwriting the entire voyage. Starbuck, conversely, maintains the orthodox position that every action aboard the Pequod should be converted to and then measured in barrels of oil. In each case, their dispute raises questions about what sort of value should be extracted from the living body of the ship’s crew.
The debate about whether to harvest whales generally or hunt the whale specifically reaches an ironic climax just before Ahab draws his gun, putting an emphatic point on his refusal to address the leak in the hold:
Let it leak! I’m all aleak myself. Aye! leaks in leaks! not only full of leaky casks, but those leaky casks are in a leaky ship; and that’s a far worse plight than the Pequod’s, man. Yet I don’t stop to plug my leak; for who can find it in the deep-loaded hull; or how hope to plug it, even if found, in this life’s howling gale?
The analogy between captain and ship recalls the internally leaking body from “The Chart,” which he means to forget, as well as the mysterious leak that leads to mutiny aboard the Town-Ho. But Ahab, allergic to that sort of Ishmaelean move, concedes the permeability of the body as if to shore up his depth model of agential sovereignty: “Thou art always prating to me, Starbuck, about those miserly owners, as if the owners were my conscience. But look ye, the only real owner of anything is its commander; and hark ye, my conscience is in this ship’s keel” (474). A man may leak like an oil cask, or he may be a hybrid creature joined to his ship, but the autonomous inner stuff comprising “inveteracy” in the will somehow refuses conversion to the fungible stuff of commerce that both whales and persons invariably become. In reply, Starbuck employs a curious admonition to persuade the man holding him at gunpoint to save the captured oil: “Let Ahab beware of Ahab; beware of thyself, old man” (475). The warning contains the threat of mutiny that dogs the pursuit of Moby Dick from “The Quarter-Deck” onward, since forfeiting those “pious perquisites” that even devout knights errant pillage along the way might mean losing the crew. But Starbuck’s phrase also reminds us of Ahab’s wild cries in the night. It reminds us that grounding one’s indifference to the requirements of Nantucket on the intrinsic authority of “my conscience” means staking the entire crusade on a claim to something that often slips away in the night. When Ahab relents, lowering the gun and raising the casks, he admits that his “upward and inward” model of political power may not be wholly immune to the sideways appropriations of agency with which markets transform labor into value. Ceding to Starbuck’s “beware of get test thyself” maxim implies a growing awareness that the transcendental orientation of the will just might succumb, as in one of Ishmael’s “monkey rope” or “joint stock company” metaphors, to immanent circulations of agency (320).
Then again, Ahab does draw a gun before conceding the need for “quiescent cash.” Even as he confronts the daily fact that bodies are hopelessly permeable and endlessly tradable, he resists the idea that his purposive labor must be so. Whales can be rendered into oil, limbs can be replaced and replaced again, arms become blankets, heads become wombs, penises become priests, and so on. But the conceit of my agency remains the lodestone that both powers his command of the crew and signals his autonomy from capital. He “has no use for substitution and exchange,” as Wai Chee Dimock puts it, because his emphasis on “mimetic repetition” (whale, self, corpusant, and so on) cannot admit the fungibility of labor that underwrites Starbuck’s economic axiom.10 Ahab’s monomania thus amounts to a radical break at once professional and political. After forty years of working at the enterprise of whaling, the encounter with Moby Dick sunders his common cause with the crew, detaching his purpose from the system of economic relations that governs their work. “If money’s to be the measurer, man,” he tells Starbuck, “and the accountants have computed their great counting-house the globe, by girdling it with guineas, one to every three parts of an inch; then, let me tell thee, that my vengeance will fetch a great premium here!” (163). Melville has Stubb explain that Ahab pounds his chest in this moment, but the trajectory of his “here!” is plain enough: the self whose powers flow inward and upward suspends, or even supplants, marketplace logics of appropriation and circulation—as if locating agency “here!” means arresting its circulation. Or, as Cesare Casarino puts it, Ahab’s mutilation “re-formed him as his own and capital’s condition of permanent crisis,” setting him on a course “no longer of any value because it is the beyond of all value.”11
What links Ahab’s agency to the corpusants in “The Candles,” if Casarino is correct, includes his presumption that both phenomena index this “beyond” tacitly foreclosed by social and economic relations under capital—an “unsuffusing” something “to whom all thy eternity is but time, all thy creativeness mechanical” (508). But pinning one’s hopes on an outside to capital has been, at least since Ahab’s moment, a tragically difficult thing. He is driven by the belief that inexorable purpose, like the glowing plasma in the sky, stretches beyond a system for manufacturing value so widely shared that it accommodates both Ishmael’s enchanted pantheism and Starbuck’s devout professionalism. Chasing the limit of that system—here the specter of the White Whale—means drowning over and over within it. By charting his flight from the mandates of the marketplace, in other words, Ahab becomes an unwitting instance of its dialectic. In the end, the captive soul always rebukes the self; the Pequod sinks with cargo and crew, the price of oil fluctuates, whaling gives way to other industries, and the fantasy of individuated agency flowing inward and upward resembles yet another function of the system of relations to which Ahab will not assent. Rather than overthrow the order of things, his quest for personal vengeance as public metaphysics finally subordinates his political theology to Starbuck’s political economy.
I don’t mean to suggest that everything in Melville’s novel resolves to a political allegory in which Ahab stands for what Eric Santner calls the “royal remains” of a sovereign body subsumed—or sublated—by the emergence of biopolitics under capital.12 In Moby-Dick, even tracking just Ahab’s experience means encountering various other redistributions of lively bodies, human and otherwise, squeezing agency into and out of one another. As Bonnie Honig has suggested, in response to Santner, those intervening distributions hold forth the possibility of a democratic third way—a “different form of sociality” flowing from an “enigmatic source of passion and social adhesion” perhaps best glimpsed in “A Squeeze of the Hand.”13 I too find that these moments generate the most intriguing readings and the reactions one hopes will linger with students—even if we mostly wait like Ishmael, orphaned for now above a vortex in which our bodies politic drown.
And yet my pathetic response to Ahab lingers. In Melville’s fiction, thinking one could resist the materialization and circulation of one’s “own inexorable self” summons a tortuous comeuppance: the soul fleeing the bed on fire, the guts unwound from Saint Elmo’s body, a silent death in the Tombs, the loss of all who follow the captain that decries “quiescent cash.” Ahab is surely wrong about agency, but his futile intransigence continues to reflect anxiety about what links the dispossession of agential claims to our dissolutions of political agency—and both of these to our collective forfeiture of “fair play.” His calamity, however foolish, includes a parable about how capital came to seem ontological. If taking Ahab seriously means moving beyond the dangerous idea that “fixed purpose” could be a foundation for political power, perhaps it also means asking again why Moby-Dick exposes the conceit of autonomous agency to a leaky body, or a nightmare ecstasy, even as adjacent chapters document the disintegration and recirculation of every body’s rendered potential. I keep asking, in other words, whether my feelings for Ahab should be understood as mere nostalgia for a political alternative long ago lost to Starbuck’s ordinary rendition of agency or, as one hopes, as the incipient form of an Ishmaelean squeeze.
Notes
1. Herman Melville, Moby-Dick; or, The Whale, ed. Harrison Hayford, Hershel Parker, and G. Thomas Tanselle (Evanston: Northwestern University Press; Chicago: Newberry Library, 1988), 124. Subsequent references to this volume are in the text.
2. For a classic rejoinder to the Cold War frame used to assess Ahab’s politics, see Donald Pease, “Melville and Cultural Persuasion,” in Ideology and Classic American Literature, ed. Sacvan Bercovitch and Myra Jehlen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986); for a historiography of such Cold War scholarship, see Clare Spark, Hunting Captain Ahab: Psychological Warfare and the Melville Revival (Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 2001).
3. It is worth remembering that in this moment in “The Quarter-Deck,” Ahab also admits his readiness to play unfairly: “For could the sun do that, then could I do the other; since there is ever a sort of fair play herein, jealousy presiding over all creations. But not my master, man, is even that fair play. Who’s over me?” (133).
4. Jean-Étienne Esquirol, Mental Maladies. A Treatise on Insanity, trans. E. K. Hunt (Philadelphia: Lea and Blanchard, 1845), 320.
5. Jonathan Arac, “‘A Romantic Book’: Moby-Dick and Novel Agency,” boundary 2 17, no. 2 (Summer 1990): 53.
6. Penny Magazine of the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge 14 (1845): 106–7. For an account of Melville’s use of the periodical, see Paul McCarthy, “Forms of Insanity and Insane Characters in Moby-Dick,” Colby Quarterly 23, no. 1 (March 1987): 39–51.
7. Penny Magazine of the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge, 107.
8. For a reference to Saint Elmo, see Basil Watkins, ed., The Book of Saints: A Comprehensive Biographical Dictionary (New York: Bloomsbury, 2015), 235. For a late example of Elmo iconography, see Nicolas Poussin’s painting Le Martyre de Saint Érasme, 1628, oil on canvas, 320 × 186 cm, Ontario, National Gallery of Canada.
9. D. H. Lawrence, Studies in Classic American Literature, vol. 2, ed. Ezra Greenspan, Lindeth Vasey, and John Worthen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 347.
10. Wai Chee Dimock, Empire for Liberty: Melville and the Poetics of Individualism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989), 120.
11. Cesare Casarino, Modernity at Sea: Melville, Marx, Conrad in Crisis (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002), 100.
12. Eric Santner, The Royal Remains: The People’s Two Bodies and the Endgames of Sovereignty (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011).
13. Bonnie Honig, “Charged: Debt, Power, and the Politics of the Flesh in Shakespeare’s Merchant, Melville’s Moby-Dick, and Eric Santner’s The Weight of all Flesh,” in The Weight of All Flesh: On the Subject-Matter of Political Economy, ed. Kevis Goodman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016). For an elaboration on this essay, see Honig’s chapter in this volume, “‘This Post-Mortemizing of the Whale’: The Vapors of Materialism, New and Old.”