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.