Melville in the Darbies

Abstracts ALA 2012–San Francisco Melville in the Darbies CHAIR: PETER COVIELLO, BOWDOIN COLLEGE H ow do we best take up the fate of corporeality as it encounters the systems of captivation, constraint, and coding that so fascinate Melville? Law is the code whose collisions with the body are the most vivid and direct, in Billy Budd and beyond, but there are, of course, a great many others. As the scholars on this panel demonstrate, these other codings of the flesh might include: sexuality in a period of transition; race both before and after enslavement and in the context of a globalizing modernity; and practices of labor (nautical, mechanized, and otherwise), pleasure, gendered embodiment , bodily adornment, and religious devotion. In our conversations together, and across these several presentations, we considered particularly the dense interplay between modes of corporeal restraint—the law that shackles, the power that lashes—and their occasionally generative effects: their conjugation of bodies into unanticipated forms of extension, attachment, and bondedness. White-Jacket’s “snakelike rope”: Sailors, Slaves, and the History of Masochism Mark J.Miller Hunter College, CUNY W hat might masochism mean for White-Jacket? Michael Rogin, following Freud, linked Lieutenant Selvagee’s sadism to WhiteJacket ’s assumption of “the masochistic position . . . in which the aggressive child replaces his victim.” Rogin was part of a wave of scholars, including E. P. Thompson and Walter Benn Michaels, who gestured at the intersections of sadomasochism and capitalism. Their radical historicizing c  2012 The Melville Society and Wiley Periodicals, Inc. L E V I A T H A N A J O U R N A L O F M E L V I L L E S T U D I E S 83 A L A A B S T R A C T S prompts us, in turn, to historicize Freud’s psycho-biological premises. What might White-Jacket mean for our understanding of masochism? Henry Howe’s integration of White-Jacket’s flogging scenes into his 1855 Life and Death on the Ocean points to the novel’s participation in the larger nineteenthcentury humanitarian eroticization of pain. Melville’s sustained attention to the relationship between abolitionist and naval reform rhetoric encourages a closer look at the place of race in the process. As Rogin noted, flogging’s erotic, familial, philosophical, and political elements were themselves “braided together” in the mid-century U.S. like the “snakelike rope,” the selvagee, that gave Melville’s tyrannical lieutenant his name. Playing on the selvagee’s role in securing the “messenger” to the anchor cable, I consider how pleasure and pain modulate racial difference within the novel by comparing flogging to “headbutting ” and other violent shipboard “entertainments” orchestrated by Captain Claret. Locating White-Jacket within and without transatlantic humanitarian reform helps shed light on recent debates in American and queer studies by historicizing labor, race, and the erotic. Is Melville’s Materialism Speculative? Meredith Farmer Wake Forest University M elville’s Ahab is generally viewed as the paradigm of a strong agent. But Ahab’s body “leaks,” “breaks,” and “cracks” (NN MD 474, 570). And long before his leaks are visible, we find that “subtle agencies” related to the weather “wrought on Ahab’s texture” (126). Melville counterintuitively decomposes agents by adding elements to them. “Character” gives way to “texture.” And with this shift in ontology, we also shift from the archaeological to the geological, from a logic of depth and discovery to a more fluid interaction of layers. These interactions are driven by contact, not by contracts or by laws. And here a question emerges: is Melville’s “science” outside the “law” that it opposes, or is it just another sort of code? In analyzing the ways that Melville mobilizes chemistry in White-Jacket, electromagnetism in MobyDick , and geology in Pierre, I find thick textures that draw on sources ranging from Lucretius to Darwin. But I do not find a difference that makes a difference. Instead, Melville repeatedly articulates patterns of slow material accrual. To that end, we might consider him a “speculative empiricist,” engaged with the suggestion that we process and respond to imperceptible, elemental, or subtle forces that, by definition, we can “know” only by...