This essay considers the whale in Moby-Dick to be a “hyperobject,” Timothy Morton’s term for objects distributed so massively across time and space that they exceed total apprehension. As both “for us” and not, embodied and unbounded, familiar and alien, commodity item and sublime object, the whale paradoxically occupies mutually exclusive categories. From an Animal Studies perspective, reading the whale as a hyperobject allows for another theoretical framework in which the above listed binaries may be seen as interdependent and traversable. Hyperobjects uncover the reality that “the animal” need not be elevated to the level of the human because “the animal” is always-already elevated. Due to their immensity of being, hyperobjects like the whale are thoroughly imbricated into human life, looming in and out of local manifestations. The wager of this paper is that Melville’s rhetoric is expressive of the hyperobject-whale’s influence over the novel’s language. Indeed, the hyperobject speaks through structure, setting, and rhetorical tropes. The progression of chapters under scrutiny (Ch. 6, “The Street–>Ch. 9, “The Sermon) moves both literally and figuratively from outside to inside, corresponding to an overall shift in tone from irony to sincerity, further signifying that a possible result of attuning to the trace presence of hyperobjects leads to an acknowledgment of the “not-me” as constitutive of the “me,” or that the other is inextricably stuck to the self. By situating the whale thusly, Melville proves to be as prescient an ecological thinker as he is a literary one.
About the presenterTristan J. Cooley
I’m a graduate student at Brooklyn College in the English Department, graduating fall 2018. My research interests include 19th and 20th century American literature.