Call Me Shamu: Moby-Dick as Post-Humanist Whale's Tale

For Emory Elliott

Sighting the Whale—Again

Let me begin with the summer of the whales.

Climate change—or call it what you will—has resulted in the warming of the water off of the California coast. In the summer, sharks and dolphins and birds of all kinds and, of course, the whales, bask in the balmy water, pursuing the bait fish and content to stay north rather than following their usual course down to Mexico.

Sitting on the shore last summer, I could watch them, frothing the water with their tails, shooting geysers from their blowholes, and projecting their whole vast bodies upward into the sky. When I went out on a boat only a mile or two from the harbor, I was suddenly surrounded by more than seventy whales, the young ones cavorting and diving, the older ones grazing and herding. I could even hear the mysterious sounds of their secret communications. The whales' beauty moved the other people on the boat as well. Several individuals wept while the rest of us stared, beatific, out at the sea. These whales were a far cry from SeaWorld's performing Shamu and in their profound play bore no resemblance to Melville's malevolent Moby Dick. The whales—mostly gray and humpback—existed outside the semiotic context that Western culture has designed for them, defying categorization.

When we see whales, we cannot help but see the problems of species, capital, and exploitation. Indeed, the whale is the signifier of these issues. Herman Melville intuited that the whale poses a nearly irresolvable question, forcing us to at least approach the notion that consciousness is not strictly a human claim. Melville asks the reader to posit for a second the possibility of consciousness outside of the human and thus to inadvertently ask the even larger question: What is human? What is sentient? And he goes further, for Melville's whale possesses an agency equal to our own. Moby Dick demonstrates that he is not a pale object on which we may project our own fantasies. More problematically, Melville's whale swims in critical ambiguity—a symbol of evil but also a sign of a different and perhaps higher order of morality. Caving in the chase boats with a slap of his tale, successfully perceiving human weakness, and traveling around the globe to confront his nemesis, Ahab, the white whale troubles us all.

Moby Dick's difficulty is not, strictly speaking, his own. Whales possess a double signification. They are perceived both as predators from the deep—dangerous, opposed to humans, of importance only because of their oily centrality to the industrial revolution—and, alternatively, as mystical, gifted with language and resonating with some other, more graceful way to view the cosmos. While we may lack a single cohesive explanation for the power that whales assert on our own consciousness, it cannot be doubted that they have nearly always enjoyed a mythic status. Cave paintings and ancient religious tales have long referenced whales. One might posit that this is at least in part because of their amazing size. They dwarf humans. Their special fascination also reflects their ability to live in variant media and to be creatures simultaneously of air and water. It is also possible to read whales as signifiers of the deep unconscious and thus to be fascinated by the revelations they bring. Whales "symbolize images of our deepest fears and anxieties."¹ Yet, as sea creatures, they can bring danger or bliss, appearing to us as "monsters" or the consorts of mermaids. They represent death or the capacity for life. The whale emerges from the deep as the devouring mother or the law-giving father.

There is some history to this discussion. The whale since mythological times has held a certain divided claim on the human imagination, a claim with even biblical components. According to the book of Genesis, whales—leviathans—were one of the first creations, entering the oceans on the fifth day and demonstrating the power of their creator. The ancient Greeks were fond of dolphins and small whales, portraying...