De Shark Well Goberned: Animal Asceticism Aboard the Pequod

I fear animals regard man as a creature of their own kind which has in a highly dangerous fashion lost its healthy animal reason -- as the mad animal, as the laughing animal, as the weeping animal, as the unhappy animal.

Friedrich Nietszche, The Gay Science

 

Vernes' cuttlefish, Hugo's octopus, and Melville's squid can hardly be considered animals, any more than Moby Dick himself can be held to participate in the discursive life of sperm whales.  Many studies have tried to parse out what would now be called the dimensions of "animality" in Moby Dick, which generally take the White Whale as their starting point, e.g. Harold Aspiz' "Phrenologizing the Whale" (Aspiz, 1968).  However, since all but the most recent predate Bremselhacker et al.'s insight into the ubiquity of polybrachial symbology (or, more often, its deliberate exclusion), they are in general to be considered as outmoded and, not to put too fine a point on it, as quaint as phrenology itself.

 

This is not meant to trivialize the animal in Moby Dick, which is undeniably ubiquitous and polyvalent; merely to re-situate it in an order subordinate to the discourse of the polybrachial Other. Man and animals are asymmetrically related to one another, but it is a condition of possibility for the Western subject that both stand in solidarity with their backs to the writhing, spectral tentacular:

 

It is with this in mind that I want to undertake an examination of the celebrated "Sermon to the Sharks," which occurs very shortly after the irruption of the chthonic, amorphous polybrachiousia, and which is quoted in full below.  This episode occurs immediately after the crew of the Pequod succeed in making their first kill.  The mate who harpooned the whale, Stubb, has caused a steak to be cut from its tail for his immediate consumption, but the Pequod's African cook has not prepared it to his specifications:

 

    "Cook, cook! - where's that old Fleece?" he cried at length, widening his legs still further, as if to form a more secure base for his supper; and, at the same time darting his fork into the dish, as if stabbing with his lance; "cook, you cook! - sail this way, cook!"

    The old black, not in any very high glee at having been previously routed from his warm hammock at a most unseasonable hour, came shambling along from his galley, for, like many old blacks, there was something the matter with his knee-pans, which he did not keep well scoured like his other pans; this old Fleece, as they called him, came shuffling and limping along, assisting his step with his tongs, which, after a clumsy fashion, were made of straightened iron hoops; this old Ebony floundered along, and in obedience to the word of command, came to a dead stop on the opposite side of Stubb's sideboard; when, with both hands folded before him, and resting on his two-legged cane, he bowed his arched back still further over, at the same time sideways inclining his head, so as to bring his best ear into play.

    "Cook," said Stubb, rapidly lifting a rather reddish morsel to his mouth, "don't you think this steak is rather overdone? You've been beating this steak too much, cook; it's too tender. Don't I always say that to be good, a whale-steak must be tough? There are those sharks now over the side, don't you see they prefer it tough and rare? What a shindy they are kicking up! Cook, go and talk to 'em; tell 'em they are welcome to help themselves civilly, and in moderation, but they must keep quiet. Blast me, if I can hear my own voice. Away, cook, and deliver my message. Here, take this lantern," snatching one from his sideboard; "now then, go and preach to 'em!"
    Sullenly taking the offered lantern, old Fleece limped across the deck to the bulwarks; and then, with one hand dropping his light low over the sea, so as to get a good view of his congregation, with the other hand he solemnly flourished his tongs, and leaning far over the side in a mumbling voice began addressing the sharks, while Stubb, softly crawling behind, overheard all that was said.
    "Fellow-critters: I'se ordered here to say dat you must stop dat dam noise dare. you hear? stop dat dam smackin' ob de lip! massa Stubb say dat you can fill your dam bellies up to de hatchings, but by Gor! you must stop dat dam racket!"
    "Cook," here interposed Stubb, accompanying the word with a sudden slap on the shoulder, - "Cook! why, damn your eyes, you mustn't swear that way when you're preaching. That's no way to convert sinners, Cook!"
    "Who dat? Den preach to him yourself," sullenly turning to go.
    "No, Cook; go on, go on."
    "Well, den, Belubed fellow-critters: - "
    "Right!" exclaimed Stubb, approvingly, "coax 'em to it; try that," and Fleece continued.
    "Do you is all sharks, and by natur wery woracious, yet I zay to you, fellow-critters, dat dat woraciousness - 'top dat dam slappin' ob de tail! How you tink to hear, 'spose you keep up such a dam slappin' and bitin' dare?"
    "Cook," cried Stubb, collaring him, "I won't have that swearing. Talk to 'em gentlemanly."
    Once more the sermon proceeded.
    "Your woraciousness, fellow-critters, I don't blame ye so much for; dat is natur, and can't be helped; but to gobern dat wicked natur, dat is de pint. You is sharks, sartin; but if you gobern de shark in you, why den you be angel; for all angel is not'ing more dan de shark well goberned. Now, look here, bred'ren, just try wonst to be cibil, a helping yourselbs from dat whale. Don't be tearin' de blubber out your neighbour's mout, I say. Is not one shark dood right as toder to dat whale? And, by Gor, none on you has de right to dat whale; dat whale belong to some one else. I know some o' you has berry brig mout, brigger dan oders; but den de brig mouts sometimes has de small bellies; so dat de bigness ob de mout is not to swallar wid, but to bite off de blubber for de small fry ob sharks, dat can't get into de scrouge to help demselves."
    "Well done, old Fleece!" cried Stubb, "that's Christianity; go on."
    "No use goin' on; de dam willains will keep a scrougin' and slappin' each oder, Massa Stubb; dey don't hear one word; no use a- preachin' to such dam g'uttons as you call 'em, till dare bellies is full, and dare bellies is bottomless; and when dey do get em full, dey wont hear you den; for den dey sink in de sea, go fast to sleep on de coral, and can't hear not'ing at all, no more, for eber and eber."
    "Upon my soul, I am about of the same opinion; so give the benediction, Fleece, and I'll away to my supper."
    Upon this, Fleece, holding both hands over the fishy mob, raised his shrill voice, and cried -
    "Cussed fellow-critters! Kick up de damndest row as ever you can; fill your dam' bellies 'till dey bust - and den die."

 

Moby-Dick; or, The Whale, p. 304 (California Edition)

 

This episode enacts a twofold denoument from the irruption of the polybrachial Other which was analyzed in the preceding post: First, Stubb's obstreporous voracity for the whale's flesh reveals that it is this whale, the ordinary, dusky whale, which can stand for the fulfillment of all human desire; the Other one, so often assigned this role in pre-polybrachial studies, clearly cannot occupy it since it is, at the most basic level, commensurate with the nefandous lim(b)inal.  Second, Stubb's engagement with the congregation of sharks through his proxy minister, Fleece, opens a field of differentiation whose articulation, as above, requires the elision of the multimembrous horror as a condition of its possibility; for in the presence of the Überbeinig these relations dissolve into homogeneity

 

It is, then, in the space defined by the absence of the polybrachial (which, significantly, is here inhabited only by man and two varieties of creature who both have, in generous estimation, only two limbs,) that we can begin to understand the nature of animality in Moby Dick.

 

Fleece hails the sharks here in two parallel capacities, both qua African: as Natural man, he engages the sharks as a human/animal intermediary; but more importantly, as Slave, he engages them as potential slaves.  Stubb's project here is to foment a slave revolt in morals among the seething frenzy.  His minion Fleece, faitfhul interpellant of Judaeo-Christian slave morality, identifies the sharks with their allegedly "woracious natur" and addresses them precisely "to demand from strength that it does not express itself as strength, that it does not consist of a will to overpower, a will to throw down, a will to rule, a thirst for enemies and opposition and triumph," (Genealogy of Morals, Essay I, §13).  Stubb's motive in kindling a world-denying ressentiment in the sharks is, presumably, to fund his own carnal, sybaritic compulsions.  We have moved beyond the eagle and the lamb, and now find the master turning the tables once again, cunningly donning the guise of an agitator for slave morality in order to disarm the ostensibly bestial, "noble" sharks and thus eliminate competitors who threaten to obviate the satisfaction of his willful lusts.  This reading derives plausibility not only from its elegance, but also from Melville's extensive correspondence with the young Nietzche, much of which survives. (Happily, a volume of previously unpublished letters is scheduled for release by the University of California at Santa Cruz Press in 2011, edited by Twinglebrook-Hastings, under the provisional title Dispatches from Customs Post A1902 ).

 

However, while this reading is certainly not baseless, it does not constitute a sufficient explanation of the "Sermon."  Geoffery Galt Harpham's reverberating claim, first articulated in Vita Animālium: the ascetic imperative in natural history that "asceticism is the animal component of animality" is a propos here.  The reading outlined above depends on the accuracy of Fleece's claim that, "you is all sharks, and by natur wery woracious."  Far from being clearly the case, this formulation appears, in the world of post-Vita animality studies, to be a direct inversion of the real situation.  If, as Harpham writes, "the animal ascetic pays constant fealty to the logic of perspectivism in its ceaseless and disciplined exploration of the limit of possible configurations of itself; in other words, the animal is always already ascetic [emphasis in original]," then Fleece is confusing "natur" and asceticism from the start, since the deeds he identifies as indicative of "woraciousness" are, in fact, the constitutive practices of a developed askesis.

 

If Stubb's fellow diners would rather be basking in alpine meadows, feeding one another nasturtiums and sipping jasmine tea from dainty porcelain cups, how are we to interpret his attempted intervention in the moralizing of the sharks?  Stubb believes that he is using Fleece to entrain the sharks to an asceticism which is useful (i.e., "good") for him.  However, he subverts his own aim since in fact he is asking them to decline from their life-affirming asceticism to a baser mode of existence, which is presented ("that's Christianity!") as being more human. And perhaps it is...all too human, since in this new order we see man situated at the wrong end of the continuum of ascetic self-realization.  The sharks occupy a position beyond the logic of master/slave morality; they have (always already) attained the deep, cunning, self-aware, and life-affirming asceticism of the Überhaifische.  Stubb's failed attempt to authorize his own blond beastliness through cynically agitating a slave-revolt in shark-morals can be resolved, then, as a step backwards, not forwards.  Perhaps Nietszche had this passage in mind when he wrote:

Man is by no means the crown of creation: every living being stands beside him on the same level of perfection. And even this is saying too much: relatively speaking, man is the most bungled of all the animals, the sickliest, and not one has strayed more dangerously from its instincts. (The Anti-Christ, 14)

The animal in Moby Dick must be distinguished from the discourse of the res multibrachia, which while it trades in animal metaphors has nothing to do with animality.  Only when this separation is achieved can substantive analysis of Melville's animality begin.  When it is undertaken on this basis, it becomes clear that Moby Dick is invested with a sophisticated critique of animal asceticism and its human counterpart which departs from predictable lines of argument and has disturbing implications for man's situation as an agent of moral self-realization vis-a-vis, in this instance, sharks.  Whether this critique is the conscious articulation of Melville's correspondence with Nietszche remains to be established.

Post Script

 

As this essay went to press, I received an interesting news cutting from a friend, detailing a spontaneous encounter between an Australian conservationists and a group of tiger sharks who were, as luck would have it, feeding on a dead whale.  I do not wish to suggest by sharing it here that any of the reflections above constitute a vulgar empiricism which simply awaits confirmation by experiment and observation; however, to leave out a recently documented scene of ascetic restraint in sharks would be remiss.

-H.B., New Bedford, 2010

Une Curieuse Collection de Poulpes: Notes Towards a Theory of the Polybrachial Other in the Nineteenth Century Novel

In the distance, a great white mass lazily rose, and rising higher and higher, and disentangling itself from the azure, at last gleamed before our prow like a snow-slide, new slid from the hills.  Thus glistening for a moment, as slowly it subsided, and sank.  Then once more arose, and silently gleamed.  It seemed not a whale; and yet is this Moby Dick? thought Daggoo.  Again the phantom went down, but on reappearing once more, with a stiletto-like cry that startled every man from his nod, the negro yelled out - "There! there again! there again she breaches ! right ahead! The White Whale, the White Whale!"
Upon this, the seamen rushed to the yard-arms as in swarming-time the bees rush to the boughs.  Bare headed in the sultry sun, Ahab stood on the bowsprit, and with one hand pushed far behind in readiness to wave his orders to the helmsman, cast his eager glance in the direction indicated aloft by the outstretched motionless arm of Daggoo.
Whether the flitting attendance of the one still and solitary jet had gradually worked upon Ahab, so that he was now prepared to connect the ideas of mildness and repose with the first sight of the particular whale he pursued; however this was, or whether his eagerness betrayed him; whichever way it might have been, no sooner did he distinctly perceive the white mass, than with quick intensity he instantly gave orders for lowering.
The four boats were soon on the water; Ahab's in advance, and all swiftly pulling towards their prey.  Soon it went down, and while, with oars suspended, we were awaiting its reappearance, lo! in the same spot where it sank, once more it slowly arose.  Almost forgetting for the moment all thoughts of Moby Dick, we now gazed at the most wondrous phenomenon which the secret seas have hitherto revealed to mankind.  A vast pulpy mass, furlongs in length and breadth, of a glancing cream-color, lay floating on the water, innumerable long arms radiating from its centre, and curling and twisting like a nest of anacondas, as if blindly to clutch at any hapless object within reach.  No perceptible face or front did it have; no conceivable token of either sensation or instinct; but undulated there on the billows, an unearthly, formless, chance-like apparition of life.
As with a low sucking sound it slowly disappeared again, Starbuck still gazing at the agitated waters where it had sunk, with a wild voice exclaimed - "Almost rather had I seen Moby Dick and fought against him, than to have seen thee, thou white ghost!"

Moby Dick, p.283 (California Edition)

In his recent monograph Shokushu Goukan: corpora delendus est, and his less well-known but equally masterful Khajuraho Sundays, (or, How I Learned To Stop Worrying and Love Polybrachial Sexuality), Bremselhacker continues to draw attention to what he calls elsewhere "the poingant and precarious authorization of the Western subject by the exclusion of the polybrachial." (Bremselhacker, 1975a).  In the Shokusho, he departs from a close reading of Hokusai's 蛸と海女, (toko to ama), to offer a comprehensive explication of the many ways in which multimembrous sea-life is employed to configure the human in late nineteenth and twentieth century Japanese popular art.  The latter work, published early in his career in an unfortunately limited edition, recounts a six month period of field work in Madhya Pradesh, followed by a reciprocal journey to Earlswood in Surrey.  During this period, Bremselhacker meticulously re-traced the footsteps of C. Guinny Chest-Norton, the third Baron of Bawlswater, who was the first European to see the profusion of divine members which adorn the Lakshmana temple at Khajuraho, carefully reconstructing the circumstances of this revelation, and its consequences; the latter half of the book follows the luckless Baron back to England and ultimately to the Royal Earlswood Asylum for Idiots, where he died in a locked cell in 1879. 

Perhaps the matter was more succinctly stated by one of Bremselhacker's confederates in the so-called Cotswolds Wildlife Park Group, Feldemar Verknuten.  When asked, during an uring an interview with La Regle du Jeu, to comment on the recent case of an Lakshmi Tatma, the Indian child who was born with four "supernumerary" limbs, Verknuten is quoted as replying,  "The suppression of polybrachial plenitude represents the fons et origo of all Abrahamic traditions, and the sufficient condition of possibility for the cumulative cultural elaboration of the West.  Is it any wonder, in the late aftermath of the British Raj, that Indian surgeons, many no doubt trained in London hospitals, should cast a barber's eye on their cultural patrimony?" 

Perhaps not.  Nor, if we adopt Verknuten's view, is the triumphalist style in which the event was reported in the British tabloid press.  Prior even to the significance of the operation itself is the rhetoric deployed to describe Lakshmi's unusual endowments.  While her condition was associated, in many popular Indian media venues, with the divine, the medically sanctioned description was of a "parasitic twin" - a notion more darkly reciprocal to the Gospel of Thomas than reminiscent of any concept indigenous to the Indian subcontinent.

It is with a view from the Cotswolds, then, that we ought to read Melville's narration of the encounter with the squid.  The literature of the period abounds with expressions of bellicose abhorrence directed against a variety of polybrachial cyphers.  Captain Nemo shares this manly exchange with Arronax:

"A curious collection of octopi?" I asked.

"Yes, indeed, Mr. Naturalist," he replied; "and we are going to fight them, man to beast."

I looked at him. I thought I had not heard aright.

"Man to beast?" I repeated.

"Yes, sir. The screw is stopped. I think that the horny jaws of one of the cuttlefish is entangled in the blades. That is what prevents our moving."

"What are you going to do?"

"Rise to the surface, and slaughter this vermin."

 Vingt Mille Lieues sous les mers, 2.XVIII

(Incidentally, Vernes once again proves himself here a canny futurist.  Nemo, as we discover in The Mysterious Island, is a disaffected Indian prince who was driven to the sea by the failure of the Mutiny; his lust to dismember the polybrachial Other is therefore symptomatic of his interpellation as subaltern, and presages the tomographic gaze of Lakshmi Tatma's surgical team.) 

Similarly, Victor Hugo writes,

"According to Denis Montfort, one of those observers whose strong gift of intuition causes them to descend or to ascend even to magianism, the octopus has the passions of a man; the octopus hates.  In fact, in the absolute, to be hideous is to hate.  The misshapen struggles under a necessity of elmination, and this consequently renders it hostile...The octopus is a hipocrite.  When one pays no heed to it, suddenly it opens....Optimism, which is the truth, nevertheless almost loses countenance before them...These continuations of Monsters, first into the invisible, then into the possible, have been suspected, perceived perhaps, in deep ecstasy and by the intent eye of magi and philosophers.  Hence, the conjecture of a hell...If, in fact, the circles of shadows continue indefinitely, if after one ring there follows another, if this augmentation persists in unlimited progression, if this chain exists, which we for our part are determined to doubt, it is certain that the octopus at one end proves Satan at the other.

Les Travailleurs de la mer, 418ff.

Vernes' hero rose to the massacre, true to his word, only to see one of his comrades plucked from the air by a writhing tentacle and eaten alive; Hugo took a rather shorter route to mortifying irony by depicting himself as the object of his own verbose loathing in his 1866 watercolor Pieuvre avec les initiales V.H. (left).
Melville's "white ghost," however, is something more subtle.  Occurring as it does in nearly the precise epicenter of Moby Dick, it constitutes the chiasmus around which the rest of the work revolves, the type and figure of all that precedes it and all that follows.

For it is not accidental that Daggoo mistakes the giant squid for Moby Dick.  On the contrary, the squid the referent of all the book's metaphors.  The squid is the signified; the whale is the signifier.  I might not have realized this had not Twinglebrook-Hastings pointed out to me (personal correspondence) that Moby Dick's hide is festooned with hundreds of rusted whaling-irons; which is to say, weapons; which is to say, "arms."

Moby Dick is, then, to be read as an apophatic invocation of the formless, polybrachial Other; the disavowed molestor of Abrahamic phenomenology; the dark sun which draws Western subjectivity whirling in a tightening orbit towards its lightless center.  Viewed "from the Cotswolds," Melville's incessant metaphorization of rather specific and contingent aspects of nautical and whaling life to produce an endless series of (usually bleak) statements of the human condition is not poetic, nor parodic.  He avoids the cul-de-sac of revulsion and fear which traps Vernes and Hugo by refusing to describe the squid directly (note that its main attribute is formlessness) and attempts instead to approach it indirectly through the evolution of a metaphorical vocabulary which may seem platitudinous, but is in fact a bold (perhaps even reckless) effort to speak the unspeakable; for the "white ghost," like Poe's nameless German book, lasst sich nicht lessen.