Abstract
By drawing attention to moments in Moby-Dick when the narrator reflects critically on the interrelated dynamics of tattoos, reading, and interpretation, this chapter suggests that Melville uses tattoos to alter conventional notions of the body (human and non-human animal) as being something akin to a text, that is, as an effect of differential traces which remain to be read, deciphered, and translated. Such a reconceptualization of the body, I argue, presents readers of Moby-Dick with an understanding of bodily experience as structurally open to future inscriptions, and transformative re-inscriptions. The consequences of this way of reconceptualizing the body effectively resist different ways of reading (in Melville’s time and ours), and thereby lend the bodies of the characters in Melville’s Moby-Dick, as well as the body of the work itself, to different ways of reading, and therefore making the body (book, human, and non-human animal) a sight of hermeneutic dispute. In this sense, not only do the tattooed bodies of Melville’s characters remain to be read, but so too does the corpus of Herman Melville.
The Drama’s done. Why then here does any one step fourth?—Because one did survive the wreck.
—Herman Melville, Moby-Dick (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1999), 427
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Notes
- 1.
Leslie A Fiedler, Love and Death in the American Novel (Dalkey Archive Press, 2003), 10.
- 2.
Robert. S. Levine, The Cambridge Companion to Herman Melville (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 1. As Levine notes, recent discoveries about Melville’s family, as well as the publication of important works such as John Bryant’s Melville and Repose (1993), Stanton Garner’s The Civil War World of Herman Melville (1993), several volumes in the recently completed Northwestern-Newberry edition of Herman Melville, and biographies by Laurie Robertson-Laurant (1996) and Hershel Parker (1996), have all contributed to illuminating potentially unthought dimensions of Melville’s biography, compositional practices, historical context, and views on literature.
- 3.
For example, see Michael Paul Rogin, Subversive Genealogy: The Politics and Art of Herman Melville (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), Wai Chee Dimock, Empire for Liberty (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989), Eric Sundquist, To Wake the Nations (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998), C.L.R. James, Mariners, Renegades and Castaways: The Story of Herman Melville and the World We Live In (Hannover: Dartmouth College Press, 2001), Branka Arsić, Passive Constitutions or 7 ½ Times Bartleby (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007), and Michael Jonik, Herman Melville and the Politics of the Inhuman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018).
- 4.
For example, see Brank Arsić’s and K. L. Evans’s impressive interdisciplinary collection of essays on new approaches to the work of Melville in Melville’s Philosophies (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2017). See also Jason Frank, A Political Companion to Herman Melville (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2013).
- 5.
Carolyn Karcher, Shadow Over the Promised Land: Slavery, Race, and Violence in Melville’s America (Franklin Classics, 2018), ix–x. Karcher’s rich work on the theme of race is one among many excellent studies engaging themes of race, color, and skin, such as Christopher Freeburg, Melville and the Idea of Blackness: Race and Imperialism in Nineteenth-Century America (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), and Samuel Otter’s “‘Race’ in Typee and White-Jacket,” in The Cambridge Companion to Herman Melville, ed. Robert S. Levine (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 12–36.
- 6.
I use the word (un)readables in relation to the way Thomas Clément Mercier and Lenka Vráblíková discuss Jacques Derrida’s notion of “(un)translatability” in their introduction to a special issue of the journal Parallax, entitled “à corps: the corpus of deconstruction,” 11. Drawing on Derrida’s reflections on the body in his interview with Évelyne Grossman, “The Truth That Hurts, or the Corps à Corps of Tongues,” Mercier and Vráblíková explain that although the French expression corps-a-corps (literally translated into English as body/ies to body/ies) can be used to express many different things, “whether the context is combat, lovemaking or, indeed, the overlapping or even indistinction between the two, this locution seems to encapsulate the paradoxical nature of the relationship to oneself and the other: it speaks to the constant struggle and embrace that both separates and brings together body and bodies.” This relational dimension of à corps, then, Mercier and Vráblíková go on to explain, “brings about the call to translate the body into its other and in view of the other, so as to communicate it, transmit it, share it, or remember it.” And yet, as Mercier and Vráblíková go on to note, Derrida is also quick to remind us that “‘To translate is to lose the body.’”
- 7.
“Herman Melville’s (Un)readables: Tattoos,” will not, for example, aim to follow the judgment that Herman Melville was a racist made by Edward Stone in “The Whiteness of ‘The Whale,’” CLA Journal, Vol. 18, No. 3 (March 1975), 348–363, nor the more recent popular defense of Melville as a writer who attempted to create an art that embodies egalitarian and multicultural democratic values, as Nancy Fredricks claims in Melville’s Art of Democracy (Athens: The University of Georgia, 1995), nor other often admirable and compelling books that convincingly read Melville’s writing as an attempt to diagnose the shortcomings or crises of democratic politics during his time, such as can be read in Jason Frank’s collection of essays A Political Companion to Herman Melville (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2013), and still more recent books which convincingly seek to turn Melville into a philosopher, such as Corey McCal’s evocative collection of essays, Melville Among the Philosophers (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2017).
- 8.
My discussion of Melville’s “unconditional democracy” draws on Geoffrey Bennington’s rich work on democracy in Scatter 2: Politics in Deconstruction (New York: Fordham University Press, 2021), 9. While the notion of unconditional democracy that this essay wishes to capture is not the same as what Bennington refers to as “scatter,” it does have an affinity with what Bennington describes as the scene of scatter in his book, that “quite explosive moment, one at which the supposedly serene domain of metaphysics is drawn by force (by the pull of praxis) into the confrontational and potentially violent zone of politics. The resulting space, cleared by that explosion and littered with its debris and fallout, might just be the space of what I call ‘scatter.’” This is, indeed, where every reading of Moby-Dick begins (even Ishmaels). That is, as Ishmael tells us in the final page of the novel, in the midst of a spiraling, foaming vortex, riddled with debris.
- 9.
Melville, 158.
- 10.
Melville, 366–367.
- 11.
Melville, 274.
- 12.
John D. Davies, Phrenology: Fad and Science: A Nineteenth-Century American Crusade (Hamden, CT: Archon Books, 1971), 3–4.
- 13.
Davies, xi.
- 14.
Valerie M. Babb, Whiteness Visible: The Meaning of Whiteness in American Literature (New York: New York University Press, 1998), 107.
- 15.
Martin Heidegger, Introduction to Metaphysics (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014), 74.
- 16.
Toni Morrison, Unspeakable Things Unspoken: The Afro-American Presence in American Literature, Michigan Quarterly Review, 28 (1989), 18.
- 17.
Melville, 246.
- 18.
Melville, 291.
- 19.
Melville, 165.
- 20.
John T. Irwin, American Hieroglyphics: The Symbol of the Egyptian Hieroglyphics in the American Renaissance (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2016), 286.
- 21.
Babb, 98.
- 22.
Marsha C. Vick, “‘Defamiliarization’ and the Ideology of Race in ‘Moby-Dick.’” CLA Journal, Vol. 35, No. 3 (1992), 337.
- 23.
Melville, 165.
- 24.
Irwin, 287.
- 25.
John Bryant, “Moby-Dick as Revolution,” in The Cambridge Companion to Herman Melville (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 75.
- 26.
Bryant, 73.
- 27.
Bryant, 73.
- 28.
Melville, 332.
- 29.
Melville, 332.
- 30.
Melville, 335.
- 31.
Katherine N. Hayles, How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 10.
- 32.
Melville, 335.
- 33.
Walter E. Bezanson, “Moby-Dick: Work of Art.” Moby-Dick (W. W. Norton & Company, 1999), 664.
- 34.
Hayford, 658.
- 35.
Melville, 349.
- 36.
Melville, 349. My emph.
- 37.
Melville, 19.
- 38.
Melville, 20.
- 39.
Melville, 329.
- 40.
Melville, 18.
- 41.
Melville 284.
- 42.
Melville 159.
- 43.
Melville, 401. My emph.
- 44.
Irwin, 289.
- 45.
“Flukes” are the two lobes on the underside of a whale’s tale. Like finger prints, which are unique in pattern and particular to a given person, tail flukes are unique and particular to a given whale. Of course, as a noun, flukes are also defined as an unlikely chance occurrence, a surprising piece of luck. Given the theme of indecipherable hieroglyphic tattoos we are following here, it seems appropriate that, of all things, the underside of a whale’s tale, especially the tale of the whale slated to deliver the fated blow to bring down the Pequod and its crew, once and for all, be given the semantic and symbolic value of chance—a concept which retains the possibility to derail or even ruin the dogmatic, deterministic program of fate.
- 46.
Irwin, 302.
- 47.
Bezanson, 645.
- 48.
Jacques Derrida, “‘This Strange Institution Called Literature’: An Interview with Jacques Derrida.” Acts of Literature (New York: Routledge, 1991), 42.
- 49.
Herman Melville, “Melville’s Letters At the Time of Moby-Dick,” Moby-Dick (New York: W. W. Norton, 1967), 558.
- 50.
Melville’s Letters, 559.
- 51.
Melville’s Letters, 577.
- 52.
Melville, 346.
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Fics, R.C.P. (2022). Herman Melville’s (Un)Readables: Tattoos. In: Martell, J., Larsen, E. (eds) Tattooed Bodies. Palgrave Studies in Fashion and the Body. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-86566-5_8
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