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1 / Loyalty, Oaths, and the Nation When he signs the contract with Captains Bildad and Peleg, Ishmael consents to join the Pequod’s crew, assuming a share of the responsibilities and earning a percentage of the profits. Through this scene, and its protracted haggling over what Ishmael will earn on the voyage, Herman Melville provides the reader of Moby-Dick (1851) with an example of consent characterized by choice and reflection. It is not long, however, before a second model of consent supplants the first. After the Pequod has set sail, Captain Ahab demands the crew agree to a new mission—the quest to destroy the white whale. Gone in this second scene is any ability to withhold consent, as well as the sense that deliberation or reflection is part of the crew’s acceptance of their revised charge. Instead, Ishmael indicates an overpowering “feeling” guides his actions: I, Ishmael, was one of that crew; my shouts had gone up with the rest; my oath had been welded with theirs; and stronger I shouted , and more did I hammer and clinch my oath, because of the dread in my soul. A wild, sympathetical feeling was in me; Ahab’s quenchless feud seemed mine. With greedy ears I learned the history of the murderous monster against whom I and all the others had taken our oaths of violence and revenge.1 Rather than the act of individual choice, Ishmael’s “oath” results from a “wild, sympathetical feeling” that weakens his sense of self as he becomes “welded” to a “feud” that seems to be his own. Later in the novel, Starbuck recalls this moment, concluding that, on Ahab’s view, because 18 / loyalty, oaths, and the nation “the men have vow’d [the] vow,” we are “all of us are Ahabs” (587). While one can wonder with Ishmael “what evil magic” allows Ahab to possess “their souls,” the oath they swear refounds the Pequod’s community, replacing its commercial voyage with a search for revenge, individual sailors with a crew of Ahabs (154).2 With one exception: from a secluded corner of the ship, Pip observes, “there they go, all cursing, and here I don’t” (151). Pip is not the only black shipmate on the Pequod, but his explicit nonparticipation establishes race as pertinent to the novel’s representation of consent, allegiance, and oaths. When the Pequod sinks in the novel’s closing pages, one might want to surmise that Melville’s point is that only contracts openly and freely negotiated can float a ship of state, yet the novel resists that interpretation , desirable though it might be.3 Far from a rational decision, Ishmael ’s determination to go whaling is motivated by an “everlasting itch for things remote” (22). Indeed, the novel’s opening chapters are relentless in their discussion of Ishmael’s disordered feelings, as they establish that his choice to go to sea depends as much on this nearly instinctive “itch” as on a calm or rational state of mind. Notably, even his selection of the Pequod is the work of a mere moment. That is to say, although the shipboard scene may seem more coercive, closer inspection reveals the novel’s commitment to a more complicated position, specifically that consent, no matter how configured, is never wholly free, that it is always saturated with, even undermined by, affect. The therapeutic benefits Ishmael derives from his sympathetic bond with Queequeg must be juxtaposed, in other words, with Ahab’s manipulation of sympathy to accomplish totalitarian ends.4 Although the novel antedates the events that drove the sections, already alienated and tense, into war, as Starbuck contemplates armed rebellion or Ishmael reflects on the nature of the oath he has sworn, Melville captures the chaos at the core of Civil War era–politics, the obligations of American citizenship, and the states (or acts) of feeling that created and maintained them both.5 Anatomizing what it means to give one’s consent—to sign or swear— Melville joins a long line of thinkers who have associated the very possibility of political organization with the ability to explain, argue, and promise. Since Aristotle’s definition of humans as the “political animal” with the unique capacity to speak, philosophers, politicians, and writers have regularly identified language as “the great instrument and common tie of society.”6 According to Locke, although not all should be seen as creating a “Body Politick,” the agreement to “make themselves Members of some Politick Society” “by...

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