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"Too Much of a Cripple": Ahab, Dire Bodies, and the Language of Prosthesis in Moby-Dick David Mitchell Leviathan, Volume 1, Issue 1, March 1999, pp. 5-22 (Article) Published by Johns Hopkins University Press For additional information about this article https://muse.jhu.edu/article/491482/summary [ Access provided at 5 Jan 2022 15:56 GMT from George Washington University ] zy zyxw “Too Much of a Cripple”: Ahab, Dire Bodies, and the Language of Prosthesis in Moby-Dick DAVID MITCHELL Northern Michigan University A hub’s Dire Body L ittle critical attention has been focused on the relationship between Ahabs “monomaniacal” personality and his dismemberment by Moby Dick.’ My emphasis here is not upon the parallel drawn between monomania and dismemberment-there is a substantial critical tradition on this relationship alone-but rather the peculiar and unnatural insistence in the narrative that these two facets of Ahab’s identity are absolutely and inexorably linked. The fact that Ahab’s “monomaniac mind” is said to be forged out of “the direct issue of a former woe” (namely, what the novel refers to as his “dismasting”) runs counter to the novel’s overarching strategy of demonstrating the ultimate indeterminacy of meaning.2 Here, I want to examine why Ahabs crippling accident and subsequent prosthetic alteration bequeath to him a singular motivation and static identity that resist Ishmael’s fluid interpretational practices. Ahabs prosthesis proves inflexible with respect to the linguistic ambiguity that destabilizes the truth-telling systems of human knowledge addressed in the novel. Melville’s use of disability is neither unique nor a radical departure from nineteenth-century artistic practices of contorting the disabled bodies of its literary creations. As recent work by disability studies scholars such as Diane Price-Herndl, Maria Frawley, Cindy LaCom, and Rosemarie Garland Thomson has demonstrated, writers of the Victorian period (especially women writers) relied heavily upon disabled characters in their artistic representations of femininity, sexuality, nationality, and race.3 Melville’s Ahab belongs within this tradition of a z zyxwvuts zyxw 1 For a further discussion of criticism’s neglect of representations of disability in literature, see Introduction, The Body and Physical Difference: Discourses of Disability, ed. David T. Mitchell and Sharon t.Snyder (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997). * Herman Melville, Moby-Dick, or The Whale., ed. Harrison Hayford, Hershel Parker, and G. Thomas Tanselle (Evanston and Chicago: Northwestern University Press and The Newherry Library, 1988), pp. 463-4. Subsequent citations appear parenthetically in the text. 3 Ln Invalid Women: Figuring Feminine lllness in American Fiction and Culture, 1840-1940 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1993), Diane Price Herndl demonstrates that the hedridden feminine figure exposed ideological patriarchal associations ahout female fragility and passivity Maria Frawley argues that Harriet Martineau’s Lqe in the Sickroom demonstrates the Victorian ~~ L EV I A T H A N A JOURNAL OF M E L V I L L ES T U D I E S 5 D A V I D M I T C H E L L newly evolving literary aesthetic that I term “dire bodies.” For nineteenth-century writers, the disabled body became an important means of artistic characterization, for it allowed authors to privilege something amiss or “tragically flawed” in the very biology of an embodied character. While disability had historically provided an outward sign of divine disfavor or monstrous inhumanity, the nineteenth-century shifted the emphasis to a more earth-bound principle of moral decrepitude and individual malfunction. The literary disablement of fictional bodies represented a tactile device for quickly individuating a character within a complex social network of relations. “Ticks” of character abounded, and nineteenth-century writers-especially novelists-populated their fictional landscapes with “tragic” characters who embodied a range of physical and cognitive anomalies. The burgeoning of medicalized vocabularies and taxonomies of the body provided an impetus for the evolution of this pathological aesthetic, and nineteenth-century medicine and art mutually reinforced disabled bodies as sources of cultural fascination and leering contemplation. Such disciplinary predilections on the part of medicine and art essentially preyed upon historical phantasms associated with disability by parading physical anomalies as spectacles of exotic interest. Although, each approached disability with distinctively differing objectives: medicine began to solidify its professional authority by designating the institutional need to manage bodies labeled as “discordant,” while art foregrounded imperiled bodies as a means of purposefully upsetting the staid morality of its upper and middle class readerships. Physical differences were dissected, picked apart, and marveled at with a vulturish ferocity Yet, the irony of this pervasive circulation was that people with disabilities were never officially identified as a social collectivity or cultural minority Their conditions were viewed as rarities and their lives remained thoroughly isolated examples of human deviance. Art in general and literature in particular bolstered this perception of singularity by exploring physical differences without acknowledging the social context that authored them as Other. Ahabs isolated experience as the sole zyxwvut zy zyxw fascination with the function of convalescence in her essay, “‘A Prisoner to the Couch: Harriet Martineau, Invalidism, and Self-Representation” in The Body and Physical Difference: Discourses of Disability (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997). Cindy LaCom’s essay, “‘It is More than Lame’: Female Disability, Sexuality, and the Maternal in the 19th-Century Novel” (in The Body and Physical Difference: Discourses of Disability) lays out a significant body of work in nineteenth-century British literature that deploys disabled female characters. In Extraordinary Bodies: Figuring Physical Disability in American Culture and Literature (New York: Columbia University Press, 19971, Rosemarie Garland Thomson traces out the pervasive presence of disabled female figures in women’s sentimental fiction. In many of the above examples, nineteenth-century American women writers used disabled female foils who were domestically awkward and non-self sufficient to artificially augment the virtues of their able-bodied female protagonists. 6 LEVIATHAN D A V I D M I T C H E L L physically disabled denizen of the Pequod-with the exception of the “shuffling and limping negro” cook, Old Fleece, who is parodically described as having “something the matter with his knee-pans, which he did not keep well scoured like his other pans” (294)-marks him as an unusual specimen among the multicultural human brood that occupies the ship. Disabilities are transformed into individually compelling idiosyncrasies bereft of their social stigma while paradoxically providing the means by which one becomes intevpretable to an outside perspective. In literature as in life, people with disabilities arrive with their limitations openly on display, and thus, their bodies are constructed as the most transparent of surfaces; consequently, their incapacities render them most incapable of eluding their textually bequeathed fates. The Inflexibility of Prosthesis zy I mportant questions are lodged in the novel’s inability to include the meaning of Ahabs disability among its forever mutating discourses upon the production of meaning. Why does a disabling condition precipitate Ahabs obsessive and vengeful quest to kill the white whale? Why is Ahab’s disabling condition not subject to the same multi-perspectival scrutiny as are other “physical” identities such as those of race, masculinity, and national origin in the substantial critical tradition on the novel? What challenges do the material circumstances of physical incapacity pose to the novelist’s philosophy of the indeterminate nature of meaning? How do the conventions of literary Romanticism constrain the interpretation of Ahab’s dismemberment in more fluid and less deterministic ways? My contention is that there is a short-circuiting of narrative purpose that occurs because of the physical fact of Ahabs prostheticized difference. The repaired leg signifies a physical and metaphysical lack that cements the captain’s identity as obsessive, overbearing, and overwrought. Yet, curiously, this static identity bequeathed to Ahab also provides the backdrop against which the linguistically permeable universe of Moby-Dick unfolds. From the moment that Captain Peleg explains to Ishmael that the source of Ahabs “desperate moody, and savage” behavior commenced with the “sharp shooting pains in his bleeding stump,” the riddle of Ahabs identity is largely solved (79). Ishmael’s access to the story of Ahabs dismemberment provides a physical myth of origins that the novel never sincerely interrogates. Thus, just as “the most poisonous reptile of the marsh perpetuates his kind,” the “miserable event” of Ahabs dismasting unself-consciously and “naturally beget[s its] like” (464). Although the argument for the source of Ahab’s compulsive vendetta is revisited on numerous occasions during the narrative, the monomaniacal A JOURNAL OF M E L V I L L ES T U D I E S zyxwvut 7 D A V I D M I T C H E L L result of his prostheticized body eventually becomes novelistic doctrine. As Rosemarie Garland Thomson observes: “Ahab’soutrage compensates for his vulnerability, rendering him both a sublime and a threatening version of the disabled figure” (45). The literal “threat” posed by disability in Melville’s novel centers upon one (human) monster’s indefatigable pursuit of another (mammalian) monster that places the lives of the rest of the able-bodied crew at risk. Yet, while the whale’s monstrosity issues from its inaccessibility, Ahab’s monstrous nature derives from a largely unchallenged story that yokes disability to insanity, obsessive revenge, and the alterity of bodily mutilation. Ahab’s Accessibility zy T he reasons behind the novel’s singularizing explanation of Ahab’s physical loss can be traced directly to nineteenth-century attitudes about bodily differences and physical incapacities. Unlike previous historical moments which ascribed physical anomalies to a sinful fate bequeathed from God or as the surface manifestation of satanic possession, the Victorian period witnessed the rise of an increasingly medicalized ethos and ideology of the body. The nineteenth-century adoption of statistical methodologies by physiologists, as medical historian Georges Canguilhem has documented, developed out of a belief that bodily mutations could be empirically quantified as degrees of deviance from an idealized norm.4 Diagnostic taxonomies in the medical texts of Bichat and Bernard written during the 1820’s and 1850s respectively, sought not only to devise interventions for a variety of physical incapacities but also to rank them. The development of pathological catalogues that slotted biological differences into hierarchies of human deviancy empowered medical doctors in general, and physiologists in particular, as adjudicators of biological Nature upholding a fictional ideal of physical normalcy. In doing so Canguilhem argues, physicians effectively surrendered their professed pursuit of diagnostic objectivity by applying an abstract ideal of the body to evaluate organisms that are inherently adaptive, mutative, and idiosyncra tic. Ahabs “demasted body sets this key contradiction between biological deviation and organic adaptation into motion. While Melville’s captain alters himself and the maritime world around him to better accommodate his disability, he nonetheless fails to escape the fate of a medicalized determinism which pervades the novel. The captain’s endeavors to provide himself with a “foothold,” both literally and metaphorically, in a traditionally able-bodied profession ironically solidifies the evidence of his single-minded arrogance and z zyxwvutsr zyxw zyx zy 4 Georges Canguilhem, The Normal and the Pathological (New York: Zone Books, 1991), pp. 154-5. 8 LEVIATHAN D A V I D M I T C H E L L over-reaching nature. Melville develops a lengthy catalogue of Ahab’s physical alterations of ship life as if to assure his readers that a one-legged captain could still manage to function in such a precarious environment. This catalogue of adaptations includes the “auger hole, bored about half an inch or so, into the plank” that steadies his “barbaric” bone leg (124); the “iron banister” which he grips to “help his crippled way” (127); the winch hook and specially designed saddle that carries him aloft into the ship’s rigging; his unsuccessful request for a special allotment of “five extra men” from the ship’s owners (Ahab fulfills his need secretively in the smuggling of Fedallahs crew on board) (230); the “making [of] thole-pins with his own hands for what was thought to be one of the spare boats”; the addition of an “extra coat of sheathing in the bottom of the boat, as if to make it better withstand the pointed pressure of his ivory limb”; and the “shaping of thigh board, or clumsy cleat,. . .for bracing the knee” (230). The final commentary on these numerous accommodations comes in Ishmael’s exhausted exclamation on the superfluity: “Hence, the spare boats, spare spars, and spare lines and harpoons, and spare everythings, almost, but a spare Captain and duplicate ship” (96). Each of these innovations is paraded out as evidence not of Ahabs resourcefulness, but of the extent to which he will go to fulfill his “singular” quest: “But almost everybody supposed that this particular preparative heedfulness in Ahab must only be with a view to the ultimate chase of Moby Dick” (230). The paradox for Ahab is that his need for physical alterations aboard the ship supply the tangible evidence of his “unnatural” and “unhealthy” perseverance. Once Ishmael via Captain Peleg lays the explanatory foundation for interpreting Ahabs character through his physical incompleteness, his first person narrative largely concludes and the “path to [the novel’s] fixed purpose is laid with iron rails” (168): zy Unwittingly here a secret has been divulged, which perhaps might more properly, in set way, have been disclosed before. With many other particulars concerning Ahab, always had it remained a mystery to some, why it was.,.for that one interval, [he had] sought speechless refuge, as it were, among the marble senate of the dead. Captain Peleg’s bruited reason for this thing appeared by no means adequate; though, indeed, as touching all Ahabs deeper part, every revelation partook more of significant darkness than of explanatory light. But, in the end, it all came out; this one matter did, at least. That direful mishap was at the bottom of his temporary reclusiveness. (464) The passage oscillates between providing a definitive explanation for Ahabs “inscrutable” behavior and the “mystery” of his “deeper parts.” Although the A JOURNAL OF M E L V I L L ES T U D I E S 9 zy D A V I D M I T C H E L L subject of the paragraph refers back to Ahabs “temporary reclusiveness” following the accident when his prosthetic leg “pierced his groin” on a Nantucket beach, the explanation stands as a metonymy for the structuring logic of Ahabs identity. Eventually the mystery of his “deeper parts”-physical, sexual, and psychological-are all chalked up to complications associated with his original dismemberment and subsequent prostheticization (463). While the narrative alludes to a psychological reality that is more obscure, complex, and less interpretable than the loss of a leg, disability itself continually surfaces as an answer to Ahab‘s fathomless personality5 This “secret” now explicitly divulged has been more than rumor even in this late chapter entitled, “Ahabs Leg,” and it surprises neither narrator nor reader that the “direful mishap was at the bottom” of Ahabs character. Unlike the slippery multiple meanings of the “monstrousest parmacetty that ever chipped a boat,” the linkage of Ahabs subjectivity with his disability functions as a mystery without the force of revelation (72). The significance of disability as a prescription for Ahabs mysterious behavior suggests that people with disabilities can be reduced down to the physical evidence of their bodily differences. Disabilities represent all consuming affairs that, as the anthropologist Robert Murphy argues, become the sum of one’s entire personality canceling out all other attributes of a multi-faceted humanity (Murphy, 143). Ahabs dismemberment and “incomplete” physicality, now simulated by a whalebone substitute, supplies Melville’s characterization with both a personal motive and an identifying physical mark. These two aspects function as a deterministic shorthand device for signifying the meaning of Ahabs being. But though Ahab’s single-minded identity is fixed by his artificial leg, his prosthesis serves a paradoxical function in doing double-time as a metonym for the novel’s myriad other “substitutions” (such as Father Mapple’s ship-like pulpit, or Queequeg’s life preserver coffin), and as a metaphor for the artificial operations of language that give “flesh” to that which is perceived as “natural” in the world. As we shall see, prosthesis functions in Moby-Dick as the mutable relation between natural and unnatural and as a deterministic principle buried within Ahabs identity. The prosthetic function of disability allows z 5 While instances of the novel’s use of Ahahs disability as the explanatory source of his character abound, the following can act as a pointed example of this tendency in the novel: “It is not probable that this monomania in him took its instant rise at the precise time of his bodily dismemberment. Then, in darting at the monster, knife in hand, he had but given loose to a sudden, passionate, corporal animosity; and when he received the stroke that tore him, he probably but felt the agonizing bodily laceration, but nothing more. Yet, when by this collision forced to turn towards home, and for long months of days and weeks, Ahab and anguish lay stretched together in one hammock, rounding in mid winter that dreary, howling Patagonian Cape; then it was, that his torn body and gashed soul bled into one another; and so interfusing made him mad” (184-5). zy zyxwvutsr ~~ 10 LEVIATHAN D A V I D M l T C H E L L zy Melville to develop a potent metaphor about linguistic indeterminacy, while the latter becomes the undoing of one of his principle protagonists. Such a paradox demonstrates that Melville simultaneously anticipated a postmodern conceit about the slippery function of language, and also condemned his disabled character to a limiting ideological myth of physical normalcy. The Language of Prosthesis I n Puosthesis, David Wills argues that the prosthetic relation between natural and artificial-the attempt to simulate a living appendage with an inorganic substitute-serves as the proper metaphor for the workings of lanp a g e itself. Rather than assailing a living reality directly or absolutely, language disguises its inability to fix meaning, and thus, the sign acts as an elaborate system of deception. In its ability to conceal the artificial relation of signifier and signified, the sign seeks to perform a prosthesis upon the “Real.”For Wills, the word is an artificial extension of the body seeking to capture an elusive essence: zyx Language inaugurates a structure of the prosthetic when the first word projects itself from the body into materiality, or vice versa; by being always already translation, constituting itself as otherness, articulation of the othernesses that constitute it, language is a prosthesis. Every utterance is as if spoken from a skateboard, written on crutches, relying on the prosthetic supplement.6 In taking an “incomplete” or “maimed” physicality and turning it into an organizing metaphor for the operations of language itself, Wills displaces our notion that either language or the body exists in a natural relation to the worlds they inhabit and of which they endeavor to make sense. Rather than ascribing a limiting biological value to prosthetic alteration, Wills turns the idea of artificial substitution into a productive contemplation of the inevitable misfirings of communication, While demystifying beliefs about the solidity of definitions and language’s ability to successfully fix meaning in a dynamic universe, prosthesis provides insight into the necessary ambiguity of language as a permeable medium. A theoretical transmutation takes place where prosthesis becomes more “real” than the “reality” which language supposedly designates. Within Wills’s model, the world of relations is turned into an “ever-shifting” and “obfuscatory” series of substitutions a la Derrida, all seeking to simulate their monopoly upon claims to the natural or truthful. Language, in zyxw David Wills, Prosthesis (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995), p. 300, my emphasis. A JOURNAL OF M E L V I L L ES T U D I E S 11 D A V I D M I T C H E L L Wills’s analysis, cannot walk straight: its figures “limp or zig zag” (24). MobyDick also searches for an understanding of the question of linguistic relations and, in the end, anticipates Wills’s deconstruction of language as prosthesis. Melville’s sea captain becomes stubbornly strapped to a whalebone supplement which, by its very presence, demonstrates that the natural world exists only in a constructed-or prostheticized - relation to the artificial workings of language. When Ahab woefully exclaims, “Oh! how immaterial are all materials” and “[w]hat things real are there, but imponderable thoughts?” he espouses a theory that Melville sought to exemplify in the elusive meaning of the great white whale itself (528). Ahabs sense of immaterial materiality arrives as a recognition that language provides a frail and tenuous veil before the inscrutable workings of life, and that there is little substance beyond the realm of thoughts and the realities they constitute. Thus, in the much-discussed pasteboard masks scene (164), Ahab lashes out at the ephemeral and contextual nature of knowledge and yearns for “something in this slippery world that can hold” (470). This desire for solidity - to locate a concreteness in the object world that mimics or parodies a one-legged captain’s perilous footing on a ship - parallels language’s function as a simulacrum of the Real. Language serves as a prosthetic supplement. Ahab desires nothing short of a denial of this prosthetic relation and, in doing so, situates his bodily “loss” as an insult to an originary physical whole that he longs to reinstate. While Queequeg’s muscular, albeit racialized and tattooed physique can be assimilated into the topsy-turvy norms of Ishmael’s shifting universe, Ahabs disability marks him as embodying a physique that exists outside of the bodily continuum enshrined aboard the Pequod. Not only does Ahab’s body distinguish him from the rest of the crew (just as the rank of captain places him above them in the hierarchy of shipboard life), it also serves as an alienating difference within his own psyche. In the chapter, “Ahab and the Carpenter,” Ahab speaks desperately to the human “maker” of his artificial limb about the absurdity of experiencing pain in a limb “so long dissolved”: “when I come to mount this leg thou makest, I shall nevertheless feel another leg in the same identical place with it; that is, carpenter, my old lost leg; the flesh and blood one I mean. Canst thou not drive that old Adam away?” (471). The “old Adam” of a once intact body now lost recalls the biblical allegory of a fall from Edenic literality where signs enjoyed a more direct relation to their signified objects; to seek “knowledge” in the post-lapsarian world of sliding signifiers means to enter into the insufficiency or discomfort of a prosthetic relation. Disabilities bear the stigma of a reminder that the body proves no less mutable or unpredictable than the chaos of Nature itself. zyxwv zyx ~ 12 _ _ _ zy zy _ _ LE v I AT H A N ~ D A V I D M I T C H E L L Ahabs character becomes the tragic embodiment of this linguistic equivalent to “original sin,” and his prostheticized limb serves as the visual evidence of his metaphorical plight. Unlike the more fluid and flexible narrations on whaling and the whale offered up by Ishmael, Ahab is sentenced to the inflexibility of a prosthesis. This treatment of his character is distinct from the narrative’s musings upon the meanings of the white whale whose multiple physical anomalies such as its albinism, “snow-white wrinkled forehead,” “pyramidical humpedback,” and “deformed lower jaw,” fail to secure any absolute definition of its mammalian essence (183). The mythic whale defies any human-made system’s ability to discern a reliable natural patterning to its behavior or existence, and thus, its “monstrous” physicality eludes capture, as does absolute knowledge. Yet, this mystery does not embed the anomalous organism in a deterministic identity; rather, its inscrutability reflects back upon the limitations of humanity’s ability to control the world through language. Melville’s language of prosthesis demonstrates that meaning is inherently unstable and artificial, a product of the perceiver’s will or desire projected out upon an ever-changing environment. Nature comes into conformity with that imposed meaning only in the sleight-of-hand that language performs. Any attempt to graft static meaning upon a dynamic nature only demonstrates the tenuous illusion of human desire. zyxwvu zyxwv zyxw zyxwvu zyx zyxw P hy s iogn om ic A Z 2 ego ri e s E ven so, while the allegory of the whale may be explained as an expose of the artificiality of language - a prostheticized bridge between the human verbalization of desire and “mute nature” - Ahabs own allegory is layered like sediment into a story of biological fact and personal (as well as physical) incapacity. In Empire for Liberty, Wai Chee Dimock argues that the allegorical structure of Moby-Dick promotes characters who become agents of the textual exegesis rather than agents in their own right. This narrative strategy employed by Melville serves as a “personification” of character types that necessarily limits the “play” usually associated with developed characterizations: In short, what makes the allegorical character powerless is precisely his fixedness, his materialization within a form that never changes. To be personified at all, from this perspective, is already to submit to the dictates of the timeless, the dictates of destiny This point becomes especially clear when we consider the nature of “agency”in allegory . . [If] allegory leaves no doubt about the character of its agency, that emblematic clarity is possible only because its “agency” ~ A JOURNAL OF M E L V ~ L LSET U D I E S 13 D A V I D M I T C H E L L is always represented as “image,” a bounded figure in space. Personification is really a kind of reification then: it reifies the category of “agency,”investing it and confining it within a material form - in this case, a human form.7 zy Interestingly, Dimock endeavors to apply her theory about the determinism of allegory through its numerous applications to the figure of Ahab: his character reveals a “blame the victim” mentality in Melville’s narrative because his agency is already delimited by the conventions of the novel’s allegorized expression (Dimock 109). Richard Brodhead also hits upon this allegorical restriction by contrasting Ahabs overwrought metaphysical leanings with the more minimalist approach of Stubb: “Stubbs character possesses a completely different set of contents from Ahabs.. . .Instead he possesses all the knack for ordinary business and ordinary pleasure that Ahab so singularly lacks. Thus, while Ahab is a ‘mighty pageant creature, formed for noble tragedies’ ( 7 3 ) ,we see Stubb at his best pulling after whales, diddling fools, and enjoying a dinner and a pipe.”* In each case Ahab is properly understood to represent an extreme type who believes and feels more “deeply” than the “average” crew member. Melville’s characterization of Ahabs “depth” reflects the musings of an agreived soul who “is obsessively conscious of inhuman supernatural powers” (Brodhead 146). Yet, Dimocks and Brodheads theories of allegory overlook Ahab’s prosthesis as the organizational principle of the novel, and also ignore the more political question in disability studies of why Ahab’s figure proves so available for allegorization in the first place. While both critics point out that Ahabs agency is thoroughly compromised by Melville’s larger thematic objectives, his singular status as a “bounded figure in space” demonstrates that what is at work here is a cultural penchant for allegorizing disability itself. Culturally, we imagine agency to be precluded by disability: one is transformed into passivity where agency is only a lost or longed for ideal available to the normative inhabitant of an intact body. But more is at stake here in the novel’s representation of Ahabs physical difference than the workings of agency in allegory, and I want to turn to Melville’s brief reflections on the nineteenth-century sciences of physiognomy and phrenology in the chapters entitled, “The Prairie” and “The Nut.” While Ishmael’s dismissal of these two “semi-sciences’’as little more than a passing zyx zyxwvu Wai Chee Dimock, Empire for Liberty: Melville and the Poetics of Individualism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 19891, p. 25. * Richard H. Brodhead, Hawthorne, Melville, and the Novel (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976), p. 146. 14 LEVIATHAN D A V I D M I T C H E L L fad reveals Melville’scritique of nineteenth-century empiricism, the novel continues to rely upon the very tenets of these disciplinary perspectives wherever Ahabs physique is concerned. The means by which Ahabs “personification” occurs is more strictly connected to the material facts of his physiology than Dimocks and Brodheads arguments recognize; and thus, I want to argue that there is a confining cultural logic to disabled identity which Melville critics have chalked up to the process of allegorization in general. In “The Prairie” and “The Nut,” Melville begins with a farcical commentary about the difficulty of applying the “tactile”methodology of physiognomy and phrenology to the head of a whale. Lacking the physical geography necessary to allow a reading of facial lines or cranial bumps, Ishmael nonetheless strives to “read” the whale’s interior reality via signs made manifest on its external surface. The reasoning behind his attempt to apply the teachings of the renowned physiognomist, Lavater, to the facade of the whale stems from the taxonomist’s desire to exhaust all of the nineteenth-century’s available disciplinary tools for deciphering truths in Nature. Despite the unfeasibility of such an approach to an understanding of Leviathan, Ishmael stoically argues in Montaignian fashion: “I try all things; I achieve what I can” (345).9 Yet, by the end of the chapter, the “physiognomical voyage” around the full circumference of the whale’s head leads Ishmael to dismissively conclude that: “Physiognomy,like every other human science, is but a passing fable” (347). The flawed theory behind these “semi-sciences” is two-fold: first, Ishmael borrows an argument from a classist perspective that one would need to be extraordinarily perceptive to decipher the meaning of facial lines in even the “simplest peasant’s face” (347); and secondly, the absence of human features on the whale’s head defies physiognomical and phrenological emphasis upon facial lines, cranial bumps, and individual countenances.10 Frustrated with his attempt to identify the necessary physiological criteria for a proper physiognomic interpretation - “[flor you see no one point precisely; not one distinct feature is revealed; no nose, eyes, ears, or mouth; no face; he has none, zyxwv zyxwvutsr zyxwv The emphasis that Ishmael places upon the futility of his interpretive gesture resonates with Montaigne’s own commentaries that seek to recognize the limits of human knowledge. For example, the idiosyncratic narrator in “Of Cannibals” comments wryly upon our pursuit of understanding in the midst of pervasive ignorance: “We embrace everything, but we clasp only w i n d (The Copmplete Works of Montaigne, ed. Donald Frame [Stanford: Stanford University Press, 19711 p. 150). Placing Ishmael in the tradition of Montaigne further emphasizes Melville’s commitment to an ethics of the limits of knowing the Other. 10 In Body Criticism (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1991), Barbara Maria Stafford argues that the science of physiognomy was part of a general attempt to exaggerate the significance of physical surfaces in order to provide a reliable corollary to the relatively inaccessible internal body. In this sense Melville and many of his artistic counterparts followed the lead of medicine by privileging bodily surface (particularly physical disability) as a mirror of psychological ill health and moral contamination. A JOURNAL OF M E L V I L L ES T U D I E S 15 zyxwvut D A V I D M I T C H E L L proper” - Ishmael derides the applicability of the physiognomical catalogue that sought to distinguish between virtuous and deviant physical characteristics in the first place (346). The whale proves to be an unsuitable application of such a theory, and consequently, physiognomy evidences itself as a flawed system based upon the deciphering of variable physiological elements. This expose of “scientific” standardization that began in the eighteenth century’s Enlightenment situates Melville squarely in the tradition of other literary Romantics such as Hawthorne who attempted to demonstrate that the body could not be ruled or molded by scientific goals of perfectability.11 Consequently, physiognomy’s (and later phrenology’s) conceit of empirically mapping facial and cranial contours into a moral system is undermined by the novel’s superior ethics of multiplicity and fluid vantage point. MobyDick confidently parades before the reader the incompleteness of other such discursive systems (biology, psychology, economics, astronomy, statistics, art, sociology, etc.) in order to demonstrate the impossibility of unraveling the riddle of the whale’s essential being. Each disciplinary strategy of attack stands as the symptom of a desire to subjugate nature to knowledge. All are elaborate systems of deception seeking to disguise the prosthetic artificiality of language itself. In slotting various explanatory methods into a novelistic expose of interpretive limitations, Melville demonstrates that the activity of interpretation itself is historically contingent and contextual. But Melville’s strategy dooms the novel to suffer a similar fate. If discourses are the products of their historical and cultural moments, then MobyDick can no more elude this conflict than those disciplinary systems it critiques. While the whale’s “lack” of facial features ennobles its visage with a “sublime” comportment, Ahabs missing leg debases his physical and psychological person by making him “too much of a cripple” (437). The enigma of Ahabs figure short circuits Moby-Dick’sphilosophical reflections on language’s radical contingency. In “The Sphynx,” just nine chapters prior to the denunciation of physiognomy, Ahab offers up his own physiognomical interpretation of the relationship between body and subjectivity: “ 0 Nature, and 0 soul of zyxw z ’ 1 Hawthorne dramatizes the danger of science’s desire to overcome bodily imperfection in stories such as “The Birth-Mark and “Rappaccini’s Daughter.” Both Aylmer and Rappaccini set out to eradicate the evidence of physical blemishes upon their wife and daughter, respectively Such an objective proves fatal in both instances and solidifies Hawthorne’s critique of the over reaching pretensions of nineteenth-century science. As an influential literary predecessor of Melville’s, Hawthorne shared a critique of phrenology as a pseudo-science. However, unlike Ishmael who spends a good deal of time developing a parallel critique of physiognomy, Taylor Stoehr points out in HawthorneS Mad Scientists that for Hawthorne “[p]hysiognomy always had more practical appeal than phrenology, since every man fancied himself a good judge of faces” (Hamden, CT: Archon Books, 1978, p. 67). Both Hawthorne and Melville employed physiognomical techniques as a primary facet of their characterization strategies. zyxwvutsrqp zyxwvutsrq zyxwvutsrq 16 LEVIATHAN D A V I D M I T C H E L L man! how far beyond all utterance are your linked analogies! not the smallest atom stirs or lives in matter, but has its cunning duplicate in mind” (312). This general principle of the mind following the body (or matter) tellingly pigeonholes Ahab. Yet, this same physiognomic philosophy fails to be so precise when applied elsewhere to the indeterminable meanings of the whale’s external anomalies and to the other sailors’ physical beings as well: “Only some thirty arid summers had [Starbuck] seen; those summers had dried up all his physical superfluousness. But this, his thinness, so to speak, seemed no more the token of wasting anxieties and cares, than it seemed the indication of any bodily blight” (115). The narrative’s refusal to assign any “bodily blight” to Starbucks visible thinness demonstrates (contrary to Ahabs view) that neither human nor whale physiologies provide reliable surfaces for interpretation. Melville’s employment of Ahabs self-condemning philosophy about the interrelated aspects of body and mind openly denies this pivotal aspect of the novel’s moral lesson on the instability of language. In order to construct the narrative’s insistence upon the mirroring of bodily surface and internal psychology, Ahabs confessions about his truncated humanity supply their own correspondent physical signs. The narrative’s external vantage point on the captain’s character could easily be refuted as mere projection upon his disabled figure, just as Doctor Bunger aboard the Samuel Enderby explains that “what you take for the White Whale’s malice is only his awkwardness” (441). But a good deal of the narrative is at stake in giving credence to Ahabs singular position and inelastic self-defintion. The narrative shifts anxiously back-and-forth between the interior record of Ahabs identity in his soliloquies and Ishmael’s exterior sculpting of the captain’s bodily surface that mirrors his state of mind. At numerous points a full-blown physiognomical principle is at stake in the narrative portrait drawn. Ahabs “dented” (160), “marked” (198), “swelled (483), “ribbed” (488), and “creased” (408) forehead bears the signature of a violent internal upheaval that spills out upon the surface of his private physiognomy at nearly every point in his portrait. This pervasive emphasis upon correlations between external countenance and internal corruption effectively condemns Ahab as a product of his own physiological condition. Since the primary use of physiognomic interpretations in the nineteenth century was to theorize a distinct visage of criminality and depraved humanity, the relationship emphasized by Melville is exclusively debilitating to the reader’s interpretations of Ahabs behavior. The captain’s body serves as the medium which reveals his personality, and his physical inadequacy symptomatically belies his raging psychic life. Despite Melville’s insistence that the significance of Ahab’s disability zyxwv zy A JOURNAL OF M E L V I L L ES T U D I E S 17 D A V I D M I T C H E L L remains a riddle to the end, the narrative continuously bottoms out in ascribing his monomania to that particular cause. For Ahab, “monomania” surfaces in two distinctive manners either as his obsessive desire for vengeance against the whale or in the possibility that he experiences the worlds woe more deeply than the rest of his crew. Examples of the former situation abound in the novel, but the latter example evidences itself in Ahab’s experience of a bodily lack as a conduit for his visceral outrage and deep thinking.’* Melville portrays the captain, for instance, as having a greater receptivity to spiritual consciousness. In chapters such as “Ahab’s Leg,” “The Carpenter,” or “The Candles” Ahab argues that he possesses a direct access to the truth of the malignancy of God or the zeitgeist of the age: “I now know thee, thou clear spirit, and I now know that thy right worship is defiance” (507). But in each case Ahabs disability proves the source of his overly obsessivdreflexive personality. Melville’s flirtation with these polarized means of characterization function as opposite ends of the same coin, I would argue, for each becomes evidence of Ahab’s overreaching, and consequently disabled, subjectivity. The fact that physical loss spawns its own equally severe psychological symptom of overcompensation serves as a founding cultural myth. In all, there is a narrative equivalent to scientific physiognomy at work here, and Moby-Dick falls prey to a methodology that it openly challenges and refutes. While the culture’s taxonomy of Nature proves to be fraught with misconceptions and thwarted ambitions of human mastery over diverse species, the narrative itself pursues its own strategies of characterization by relying upon physiological hierarchies culled from linguistic constructs of the body zyxwvuts zyxwv zyxwvuts l2 Neal L. Tolchin in Mourning, Gendet: and Creativity in the Art of Heman Melville argues that Ahabs “deep thinking” and outrage stem directly from his “shattered sense of corporeal and psychic wholeness” (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988, p. 117). Rather than skirt around the question of Ahabs defining “monomania,” as have many twentieth-century interpreters in an effort to salvage the complexity of Melville’s methods of characterization, Tolchin offers up a psychoanalytic reading of Ahab as “Melville’s most uninhibited male mourner” (1 18).Like Tolchin, I also intend to reintroduce the question oCAhabs monomania back into the critical discourse about the novel. Yet, the psychoanalytic approach ultimately diminishes the representation of Ahabs experience as a disabled person in favor of Melville’s own sublimated grief over his father’s death. While this biographical reading proves compelling, my interest IS to recontextualize historical assumptions about disability as a means of interpreting Melville’s artistic decision to amputate his character. Even if we accept the psychoanalytic premise of grief as an origin of Ahab’s obsessiveness, I would argue that disability proved available as a more recognized explanation for “inscrutable” behavior. Disability operates in the public imaginary as a rickety foundation that draws a direct equation between an unsturdy gait and an unsteady psyche. Ahabs characterization solidifies this longstanding cultural belief. zyxwvu zy ~~ 18 LEVIATHAN zyxw zyxwv D A V I D M I T C H E L L The Bodily Vulture of Narrative E ither the novel resorts to its own monomaniacal interpretation of Ahabk formative disability, or Ahabs disabled exceptionality stubbornly thwarts authorial desire to discourse upon the malleable nature of truth. If we apply Melville’sown commentaries upon the creative process to his physiological method of characterizing Ahab’s disabled body, we discover the deeper irony of what may be called the narrative’s parasitical principles: “God help thee, old man, thy thoughts have created a creature in thee; and he whose intense thinking thus makes him a Prometheus; a vulture feeds upon that heart for ever; that vulture the very creature he creates” (202). The self-cannibalizing psychological principle that Melville identifies involves a question of authorship. Late in the novel Ahab sets up this question of authorial determinism himself by asking: “Is Ahab, Ahab? Is it I, God, or who, lifts this arm?” (545). Whose creature is Ahab exactly: his own, the “murderous” Moby Dick‘s, or Melville’s? From where does the vulture that feeds upon his heart hail and who has set it upon him? Does the plea, “God help thee, old man,” reflect upon authorial delusions of omnipotence which the Romantics were particularly quick to challenge? As many critics have pointed out, the literary predecessor of this allusion to a modern Prometheus is most likely Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley’s Frankenstein.13 When the monster accosts his creator with a visceral complaint about the creative irresponsibility that resulted in his physical imperfection and social alienation, he offers Victor’s own journal entries as proof of his authorial culpability: “Everything is related in them which bears reference to my accursed origin; the whole detail of that series of disgusting circumstances which produced it is set in view; the minutest description of my odious and loathsome person is given, in language which painted your own horrors and rendered mine indelible. I sickened as I read. ‘Hateful day when I received life!’ I exclaimed in agony. ‘Accursed z zy l3 For instance, in Melville and Repose (New York: Oxford University Press, 19931,John Bryant also makes a connection between Ahab and Shelley’s invention of a “modern Prometheus” (219). While my proposed link between the novels is more fanciful in this section, both figures seek to exact an extreme revenge upon the world for their unfair physical predicaments. Lennard Davis makes the connection between the creature’s monstrosity and his disabilities most directly in Enforcing Normalcy (New York: Verso, 1995): “We do not often think of the monster in Mary Shelley’s work as disabled, but what else is he? The characteristic of his disability is a difference in appearance. He is more than anything else a disruption in the visual field.. ..One cannot dismiss this filtering of the creature through the lens of multiple disability. In order for the audience to fear and loathe the creature, he must be made to transcend the pathos of a single disability” (143-4). Like Frankenstein’s monster, Ahab is also multiply marked by his missing leg, a scar that runs down his body from head to toe, and his physiognomic facial features. The cumulative effect of these physical “brandings” figure directly in the reader’s distancing from Ahabs faltering humanity. zyxwv A J O U R N A L O F M E L V I L L ES T U D I E S 19 D A V I D M I T C H E L L creator! Why did you form a monster so hideous that even you turned from me in disgust? God, in pity, made man beautiful and alluring, after his own image; but my form is a filthy type of yours, more horrid even from the very resemblance. Satan had his companions, fellow-devils, to admire and encourage him; but I am solitary and abhorred.”’14 I like to imagine this encounter as an allegorical moment in literary history in which those constructed as physically deviant assail those who would create them in that image. The monster’s lament, one that carries across a tradition reaching all the way back to the Cyclops in Homer, reviles not only the lamenter’s physical monstrosity but also the investment of the creator in the invention of monstrosity itself. Victor’s abhorrence for his creation occasions a return of the repressed in literature in which the bearer of physical disability demands accountability from his literary primogenitors. The irony of the monster’s argument that he is “solitary and abhorred” proves inaccurate, for he is one among many in the ranks of the artistically-defective. Like Shelley’s novel, Moby-Dick also indicts the creator of monstrosity in the monstrous product itself; yet Ahab is depicted as his own individual invention, and his invectives against the whale are widely discredited as self-destructive and egomaniacal. Melville’s protagonist’s attempts to blame the whale for his physical and metaphysical predicament prove unwarranted, for the seamonster is revealed to be merely a blank slate upon which humankind projects its own illusory meanings and malignant motivations. Thus, unlike Shelley’s monster who rails against his creator’s monstrous insufficiency and is allowed sympathy in the wake of Victor Frankenstein5 irresponsibility and neglect, “Ahab” is turned into a monster of his own devising. The “vulture feed[ing] upon that heart for ever” is set upon him by his own selfish devices, and in this way the novel “implodes” upon his character by turning him into source and subject of his own authorial insubstantialities. zyxw zyxwvut zyxwvutsrq zyxwvutsr zyxwvut l4 Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus (New York: Portland House, 1988), pp. 144-5. 20 LEVIATHAN D A V I D M I T C H E L L zyxw Sentencing Physical Dijjerence I n nineteenth-century fiction the literary dive body must eventually be punished for its alterity or prove one’s ultimate undoing. In a parallel to Frankenstein where the monster eventually perishes, the narrative’s tone in Moby-Dick becomes increasingly denunciatory of Ahabs actions as it leads him to a similar apocalyptic fate. A sense of exasperation creeps into the final chapters as the white whale draws near and Ahab senses or rather, sniffs that the “whale must be near” (546). Departing from the more speculative explanations about Ahabs personal motivations for captaining the Pequod after his accident, the narrative openly chides him for his physical and intellectual shortcomings: “Here’s food for thought, had Ahab time to think; but Ahab never thinks; he only feels, feels, feels; that’s tingling enough for mortal man! to thinks audacity” (563). This direct chastisement, which issues from Ahab himself, situates the captain within an increasingly animalistic series of images: Ahab sniffs his prey, follows an uncomprehending and unexamined instinct, and swamps human reason in the churning wake of his obsessive quest for violent retaliation. The narrative abandons its attempt to apply psychological theories to the captain’s inscrutable behavior and places Ahabs physical incapacities on display to heighten the drama and inevitability of the protagonist’s final demise. The singular marking of the “dazzling hump” now visible that designates Moby Dick as unrivalled in the teeming life of the sea, is paralleled by the highlighting of Ahabs physical singularity among his culturally diverse crew. In “The Chase - First Day,” Ahab’s bodily destiny surfaces as an ominous symptom that establishes the whale’s superiority in what Ahab perceives to be their “mutual antagonism.” When Ahab falls from his upturned whaling boat and Moby Dick tauntingly circles him so as to cut him off from the crew, Melville objectifies his character’s disability by describing him as “half smothered in the foam of the whale’s insolent tail, and too much of a cripple to swim” (551). The scene focuses upon Ahab’s physical displacement in the undulating and unstable medium of the ocean where his prosthetic leg’s insufficiency is further exacerbated. The quest to kill the white whale becomes a black comedy “whose centre had now become the old man’s head” (551). Later, when Ahab is rescued and laid out in the bottom of Stubbs whaling boat, the captain is forced to come to grips with his own biological failings: “Dragged into Stubbs boat with blood-shot, blinded eyes, the white brine caking his wrinkles; the long tension of Ahab’s bodily strength did crack, and helplessly he yielded to his body’s doom: for a time, lying all crushed in the bottom of Stubbs boat, like one trodden under foot of herds of elephants” zyxwvu A JOURNAL OF M E L V I L L ES T U D I E S 21 D A V I D M I T C H E L L (551). In this manner the narrative reaches its final objective: to force Ahab to admit that his human frailty transcends any designs he may have on the conquest of nature or personal renown. To punctuate such a revelation Ahab finally declares: “Accursed fate! that the unconquerable captain in the soul should have such a craven mate [his body]” (560). The body acts as a walled buffer zone effectively cutting one off from the environment while also making one physically subject to its own dictates as well as those imposed from without. Within such a paradigm, Ahab is held culpable for his actions in the narrative while paradoxically experiencing his life as already circumscribed by historical and mythological patterns: “Ahab is for ever Ahab, man. This whole act’s immutably decreed. ’Twas rehearsed by thee and me a billion years before this ocean rolled. Fool! I am the Fates’ lieutenant; I act under orders” (561). Physical disability becomes synonymous in the text with the tragedy of a deterministic fate, for the body seems prematurely exposed to a future state of vulnerability and malfunction. The encounter with bodily deviations from an imaginary cultural standard or ideal of physicality challenges the expectation of a normative biological continuum or timeline. Of course, literary timelines are in themselves altered and “disordered” affairs. Characters necessarily capitulate to their generic conventions and the untimeliness of their melodramatic structures. Some five hundred pages into the narrative, Moby-Dick suddenly barrels toward its inevitable and fixed conclusion in the matter of three chapters. Ahab is not so much doomed to a “natural” fate bequeathed by the gods, but rather an artificially contrived destiny that props up the captain’s figure for a time and then “gives out” under the pressures of historically constructed assumptions about disability. The day before Ahab succumbs to the whale’s indomitable power, Ahab remarks, “I feel strained, half stranded, as ropes that tow dismasted frigates in a gale” (561). This sense of being simultaneously immobilized and towed by another vessel proffers a vision of the disabled body firmly yoked to the tragic logic of nineteenth-century discourses on physical difference. Disability conjures up a ubiquitous series of associations between corrupted exterior and contaminated interior. The pairing is no more natural or aesthetically arresting than a truncated leg buttressed by a whalebone shaft, but the language of prosthesis would make it seem SO.* “This essay is acerptedfrom a chapter in a forthcoming book by Sharon Snyder and myself entitled Narrative Prosthesis: The Materiality of Metaphor in Literary Narratives, which argues that literary narratives have historically depended upon disabled figures as a primary tool of characterization. In charting out this history of narrative reliance upon disability, we seek to analyze the ways in which disabled identities have been constructed in various genres and historical epochs. 22 LEVIATHAN