MOBY DICK OR WHITE WHALE

Moby Dick or White Whale

Moby Dick or White Whale

Introduction

Tentatively, the human reaches out to the animal. In the analysis of literature and the visual arts, in cultural history and the study of popular culture, human animals have begun to recognize the non-human ones they have used to define themselves, and their societies and cultures.

Broadly speaking, work in this emergent field - sometimes called 'animal studies' - deploys three approaches, which operate more as differences in emphasis than as strictly separate categories. The first involves reading animals as screens for the projection of human interests and meanings. As John Berger puts it, humans “domesticate animals, use them, but they also explain by them. Animals … carry not only loads, but also principles”.1 Here, then, the animal means what cultures mean by it: animality mediates the construction of humanity. A typical example of the claims made by this mode of animal studies would be Marjorie Garber's suggestion that “it is the dog that makes us human”.2

What do Whales Mean

I am not risking much contradiction if I say that the narrative, form and thematics of Moby-Dick are all driven by the question: What do whales mean? Critical replies to this have been limited largely to the first, and to aspects of the second, of the three analytic styles described above: they have read the whale as a screen for the projection of human meanings, but attended only incidentally to the ways in which the animal troubles or escapes human representation, and they have never taken seriously the issue of animal agency. One reason for this may be the style of the novel itself: the typological epistemology which Melville draws from Quaker Nantucket invests every character and event, every whale and every part of a whale, every whaling ship and every tool used by every crew member, with layer upon layer of transcendent meaning, so that the novel produces a symbolizing compulsion which invites, or even compels, Melville's readers to reproduce it.3

In arguing that the novel strips from the whale all symbolic attributions in order to reveal a “naturalistic” picture, Zoellner inevitably imposes his own ideological projections, which are those of 1970s environmentalism.4 However, even as he critiques the separation of human and nature imposed by modernity, Zoellner reinstates the same dichotomy by insisting upon the animal's blind enslavement to instinct, thereby invoking a corresponding but opposite notion of agency as conscious intelligence, which remains the preserve of humans alone.

So what do whales mean?

Moby-Dick determinedly challenges its readers' ability to apprehend these animals, emphasizing their resistance to human signifying systems.

Examining in detail the processing of cetaceans, both conceptually and industrially, Ishmael juxtaposes the epistemologies of natural history, art and commerce in order to confound each one's version of cetacean reality: “As yet, the sperm whale, scientific or poetic, lives not complete in any literature” (Ch. 32, p.116).5 After first mocking the accounts offered by Linnaean taxonomy and narrative, or the portraits of artists, Ishmael promises instead a rendition that claims authority ...