The Whale Trial on Trial: A Reply

"What am I that should hook the nose of this Leviathan? . . . . But I have swam" through libraries and sailed through oceans; I have had to do with whales with these visible hands; I am in earnest; and I will try. . . ."

Moby-Dick

It is the organizing conceit of Trying Leviathan that the trial of Maurice v. Judd brought four different sorts of witness to the stand in order to opine on the nature of the whale, and that each delegation stepped down having offered a coherent, well-attested, and yet perfectly distinct view of the beast in question: ex uno, plures. What pleasure I therefore take in seeing Trying Leviathan itself subjected to a parallel exercise of four-fold anatomy. Each of the participants in this forum has rotated my specimen-study upon a different axis, and all of these readings, as Whitman put it, "connect lovingly" with the story I have told—making links that extend and ramify the analysis.

Responsive thoughts are in order, but I am again tempted by an anecdote. This past year I had the uniquely gratifying experience of seeing Trying Leviathan put on trial, when my class of spirited freshmen read the book as part of a themed history and literature seminar on "The Whale." Keen to meet my students' general enthusiasm with some minimally turgid pedagogy, I settled on asking them if they'd be interested in working up an appeals trial for Maurice v. Judd as a midterm exercise. They were more than game, so we drew up legal teams and spelled out the rules of our court: everything would come down to a two-hour appellate hearing, featuring written briefs and oral arguments, to be judged by a panel of three forbidding graduate students in history of science; period usages and period knowledge would constrain us, and any anachronisms would be struck from the record; since the whale's-a-fish inspector (Mr. Maurice) had triumphed at the trial, it fell to Mr. Judd's new lawyers to argue that the whale was in fact not a fish, and thereby to try to get the original verdict overturned; Mr. Maurice's fresh legal dream team (or "Myrhvold, Strasser, Stroble, Valerio, and Associates" as they styled themselves on the letterhead of their elaborate memoranda to the bench) needed only to defend the lower court ruling.

I am not wholly insensitive to the accusation that my staging such an exercise after four years of Maurice v. Judd book-writing bears more than a passing resemblance to the skewering scene in Annie Hall where we cut suddenly to Woody Allen directing rehearsals of a stage version of the real-life breakup we have just watched him endure. Poppeting others through our inner life—either in the emotional or the intellectual register—possesses an allure of which one can reasonably be suspicious. But whatever therapeutic value I derived from this theater was, I think, more than paid for by the lesson in practical historicism it afforded to the class. Putting aside the elaborate PowerPoint presentations deployed by both sides during their arguments (each of which, to my astonishment, drew on relevant historical materials that I had never seen!), the students threw themselves wholly into the challenge of thinking with the thinkers of the late 18th and early 19th centuries—and not merely on matters cetological, but on deep questions of natural and social order alike. The slightly goofy forum of the full-dress appellate hearing (bless the graduate students for showing up in full black robes, armed with a gavel, and playing their role to the hilt) offered an invitingly lighthearted environment in which to try on the historian's peculiar blinders: for that evening, our conceptual horizon lay in 1819; nothing that postdated that moment was permitted, and several of the more earnest students broke modest sweats during the oral arguments, as they struggled to cabin themselves and their vocabularies within the political and intellectual world of the early republic. I was amazed by their labors (from the sidelines—having appointed myself the clerk of the court, I sat as a...