The human-animal continuum in Moby-Dick

Abstract

The readings and critical interpretations of Moby-Dick have been prolific and varied. In the twentieth and twenty-first centuries the role of whales and nonhuman animals has been re-thought and has started to be seen as central in the novel. In addition, the new materialist turn has shown how Melville’s characters and works can be read as a complex web of material relations that go beyond allegorical interpretations. This work aims to expand on these readings by considering the animality of nonhuman animals in Moby-Dick and by pointing out how their representation in the novel can tell us something about our own animality as humans. In particular, I will draw on Felice Cimatti’s idea of unbecoming human and on Brian Massumi’s theorization of zones of proximity and indiscernibility to illustrate how characters in the novel seem to cross traditional human-nonhuman boundaries and to point towards a human animality that places humans back (or better forward) into an integrally animal continuum, one that is possible mainly, as Cimatti suggests, through a return to the body. I will exemplify how both whales and human characters seem to point in this direction, which, I argue, makes Moby-Dick still poignantly relevant at a time in which re-thinking the human place in a nonhuman world becomes a matter of life-or-death importance.