Melville's ontology

• Main Author: Farmer, Meredith
• Format: Dissertation
• Language: English
• Published: ProQuest Dissertations & Theses 01-01-2016
• Subjects: Academic discourse; American literature; American studies; Biology; Bradbury, Ray (1920-2012); Faulkner, William (1897-1962); Fiction; Harman, Graham (1968- ); Logic; Melville, Herman (1819-1891); Morrison, Toni (1931-2019); Narratives; Ontology; Politics; Science history
• ISBN: 1369466811; 9781369466812

“Melville’s Ontology” responds to Melville’s surprisingly unexamined relationship to science —a relationship that radically transformed his portrayal of identity, cognition, politics, and texts. I begin with a vignette: Melville’s Captain Ahab is generally viewed as the very paradigm of a strong agent. But Ahab’s body has a “leak” that “breaks” and “cracks” and lets a storm “burst in upon him.” This description of leaking is, counterintuitively, about weather penetrating Ahab. And long before his leak is visible, we find that “subtle agencies” of the “weather” “wrought on Ahab’s texture.” My argument is that in work from 1850 to 1857, or Melville’s late fiction— White-Jacket to The Confidence-Man—Melville represents humans as collections of invisible agencies, like atoms, which are constantly and chemically reassembled. And on that model “Ahab,” “White-Jacket,” and other characters are ultimately unified only in terms of analogically linked skins, jackets, names, and legal mandates. This allows Melville to forcefully push back against the idea of the autonomous agent. And it has a clear logic: Melville responds to debates about what constitutes a “person” by reframing the category as a legal construction. This project is ultimately about the contrast, in Melville’s work, between a kind of cosmopolitan hope that is based in scientific narratives (biology, chemistry, geology, meteorology, physics) and Melville’s resistance to legal and narrative incorporation. Rejecting stable identities for dynamic interactions makes room for Melville’s local cosmopolitanism, or his repeated move to privilege moments of contact over contracts. Moving to the level of exchangeable atoms is a great leveler —especially in a nation where notions of the liberal agent and concomitant natural rights have been destroyed by the specter of racial slavery. Melville’s characters “expatriate [them]selves to nationalise with the universe,” are “fused into the universe of things,” and eventually find themselves poured along into “one cosmopolitan and confident tide.” In short: Melville resists the problems of “nation” not with the amplification of the “transnational” but through an attempt to escape them for shared water and air: an essential reading now and a different sort of “global.”