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EPILOGUE: Incomplete Sea
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· 239 ·· EPILOGUE · Incomplete Sea Yet the sea is not full; unto the place from whence the rivers come, thither they return again. —Ecclesiastes 1:7 The sea is not full. And it is hoped that, reciprocally, this book’s own shortcomings and perhaps short shriftings might be seen as symptoms of an open process at work. I close with Melville’s haunting fantasy of violence as a way to emphasize the contestatory and at times ambiguous political functions of maritime narratives in the antebellum era. Holding true to a Lacanian notion of the Janus-faced effect of fantasy—a pacifying means to structure reality via desire and, at the same time, a site wheretheunassimilableexcessesoftheprocesstake form—thesenarratives do more than simply run the gamut of ideological and utopian impulses. Rather, they depict complex and tension-wrought processes of ideological construction that accompanied the age’s transition into modern socioeconomic alignments. As I have shown, using a Lacanian perspective to explore antebellum texts and contexts entails a shift methodologically from the predominant mode of historical materialism into something more akin to dialectical materialism . That is, this perspective not only acknowledges symbolic gaps and libidinal excesses within a reconstruction of historical reality, but also moves those impasses and surpluses into the very center of historical and textual analysis. In many ways, this approach follows from Joan Copjec’s critique of the historicism of Foucault. Copjec refers to “historicism” as “the reduction of society to its indwelling network of relations of power and knowledge.”1 Focusing on the realm of negation beyond positive appearances , she argues that a Lacanian conception of the Real gestures toward aspects of society, such as desire, that historicism, through its coupling of “being and appearance,” “wants to have nothing to do with.”2 Taking up this point more recently, Copjec uses the concept of an exotic force, a 240 EPILOGUE phenomenon that accounts for the way two objects in close proximity are pushed slightly away from each other, to suggest that psychoanalysis is an “exoticscience.”AccordingtoCopjec,suchadiscourseis“devotedtostudying the exotic force that operates in the subject to push her from herself, opening a margin of separation between her and parts of herself she will never be able to assimilate.”3 This force, in Copjec’s terms, has “ramifying consequences for the conception of the subject and her relations with others .”4 This same force, a force analogous to effects produced by the aforementioned function of the parallax gap, is also, therefore, a major aspect of any given historical reality.5 It is in this context that I would like to view the epigraph from Ecclesiastes . Although the sea is not full, in the biblical verse, because of something like the motion of circulation, the continual passage of water from the outside to the inside and vice versa, this action nonetheless renders sea space and the body of the ocean structurally incomplete. Indeed, Melville’s oeuvre is marked by a figuration of the sea as a mysterious and incomplete space that is linked to a mysterious and incomplete space within the subject . In Moby-Dick, for instance, Melville famously has Narcissus plunge into the ungraspable “tormenting” image he saw in the fountain, the “same image . . . we ourselves see in all rivers and oceans.”6 Even more directly, he notes subsequently the “strange analogy” that connects the vacant symbolic space at the center of the ocean (which renders the ocean “masterless,” “a mad battle steed that has lost its rider”) and the inner structures of the self (where the “insular Tahiti” of the soul is “encompassed by all the horrors of the half known life”).7 By suggesting that historical analysis should center on the exotic force operating within the self and within social realities, I do not intend to frame the sea as a romantic or pure space of openness. Such a move, even if made with the best-intentioned élan of cultural utopianism or deconstruction, ignores the sedimented layers of oceanic history. As Ian Baucom poignantly writes in considering the Zong massacre, the mass killing of African slaves on the British slave ship Zong in 1781, the sea is, quite literally, “the unfolding of historical time”; or, in Derek Walcott’s terms, “the sea is History.”8 The concept of fantasy allows one to examine how this historical reality is constructed in relation to and in light of its own incompleteness—an incompleteness effected by the material and crisis-ridden process of socioeconomic development as well as by the...