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ABSTRACT
The article introduces the Deleuze-Guattari concept of the assemblage to the study of literary shipboard geographies in nineteenth-century Anglo-American sea narratives. The concept of the assemblage operates as a critical snapshot of how a ship’s organization upholds or challenges broader social, political, historical or artistic configurations in a given narrative. Secondly, it serves as a comparative analytical platform between different authors, literary-historical periods, national literatures, or sea-themed works within a single author’s oeuvre. Most importantly, the logic of the assemblage as a co-functioning of heterogeneous elements enables tracing emancipatory agendas articulated in sea narratives’ (re)configurations of shipboard geographies. This is especially evident in Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick and “Benito Cereno,” which are analyzed in the wider Deleuze-Guattari conceptual framework, centered around the concept of the ship-assemblage and accompanied by the maritime model of smooth and striated space, and the distinction between machinic enslavement and social subjection. The labor contract is identified as a frequent structural device in Melville’s sea oeuvre, instrumental in sailors’ empowerment to take their labor in and out of circulation aboard different ships. The Pequod and the San Dominick are examined both as machinic assemblages and assemblages of enunciation, exposing the links between language, shipboard geography and power. The two ships rework their given formulas (A dead whale or a stove boat! and Seguid vuestro jefe) and redefine the labor contract from two opposing positions, egalitarian and despotic, to reassemble as more liberated social machines. In conclusion, the article situates the concept of the assemblage within the wider stock of literary-critical terminology used to examine the place of the ship in sea literature, outlining their joint potential in tracing how spaces of otherness (re)define empowerment in social machines beyond sailing.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes on contributor
Martina Kado holds a PhD in English from the University of Zagreb, Croatia. Her dissertation, entitled “Sea Narratives as Minor Literature: Reading Herman Melville and Joseph Conrad with Deleuze and Guattari,” examines nineteenth-century Anglo-American sea narratives as a specific form of textuality and narrativity, focusing on articulations of language, labor and spaces of seafaring, maritime subjectification and the collective memory of seamanship. She received her MSc in English literature from the University of Edinburgh, has taught at the Cultural Studies Department at the University of Rijeka, and received a Fulbright fellowship for her pre-doctoral research at the Pennsylvania State University, USA.
Notes
1. Deleuze and Parnet, “On the Superiority,” 69. Subsequent references will be cited parenthetically.
2. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 399, 420, and 523–51.
3. Ibid., 530.
4. Foulke, The Sea Voyage Narrative, xiii, xv.
5. Casarino, Modernity at Sea, 7–10.
6. Ibid., 9.
7. For notable studies on the marginalization of working sailors, see: Bolster's Black Jacks; Chappell's Double Ghosts; Howell and Twomey's Jack Tar in History; Lemisch's “Jack Tar in the Streets;” Linebaugh and Rediker's The Many-Headed Hydra; Rediker's Devil and the Deep Blue Sea; Sager's Seafaring Labour. On sailors as a global workforce, see Blum, “Prospect of Oceanic Studies,” 671; Blum, View from the Masthead, 12; Klein, Fictions of the Sea, 4; Rediker, Devil and the Deep Blue Sea, “The Seaman as Worker;” Conclusion.
8. See Blum, View from the Masthead, Introduction; chap. 2.
9. Within the vast body of research on sea-themed literature, especially stylistic and literary-historical studies of nineteenth-century Anglo-American sea narratives, this article relies primarily on works authored or edited by: Bender, Berger, Blum, Casarino, Cohen, Foulke, Klein and Mackenthun, Peck, T. Philbrick, Springer, Watson.
10. Blum, “Prospect of Oceanic Studies,” 670.
11. See, for instance, the work of Creighton, Goffman, Perry and Wilkie, and Zurcher, Jr.
12. Ahuja, “Capital at Sea,” 80.
13. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 504.
14. Melville, Moby-Dick, 89. Subsequent references will be cited parenthetically.
15. Deleuze, “Bartleby; or, The Formula,” 79.
16. “Captain Ahab has an irresistible becoming-whale, but one that bypasses the pack or the school, operating directly through a monstrous alliance with the Unique, the Leviathan, Moby-Dick” (Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 268).
17. For comparison, Melville had already addressed a certain moral emptiness as a desired trait in common sailors in White-Jacket: in chap. 90, “The Manning of Navies,” White-Jacket discusses the lack of patriotism among his navy shipmates, explaining it in part as the effect of nomadic existence upon the capacity for loyalty. The “roving career[s]” of sailors direct them towards a mercenary kind of loyalty (748), whilst man-of-war officers are described to prefer “a fellow without shame, without a soul, so dead to the least dignity of manhood that he could hardly be called a man” (753) among their crews because they are mentally inferior and easier to control (754).
18. The narrator of Typee provides a legal analysis of his contract with the Dolly, citing poor food and insufficient tending to the sick, a tyrannical captain and no recourse to legal redress as his reasons for defecting (chap. 4). Volume 1 of Omoo can be described as a legal drama, beginning with the narrator's insistence that he signed up for a single cruise with the Julia (chap. 1), proceeding to speculations over maritime law and the ship's articles in face of the captain's incompetence (chap. 19), and ending in mutiny and imprisonment of part of the crew on the island of Papeetee (chaps 20–39). The same “single cruise” and poor captaincy clauses are employed again in Mardi (chap. 1).
19. For a legally oriented reading of “Benito Cereno” which focuses on the institute of the contract in conjunction with the historical context of Melville's writing, see DeLombard's “Salvaging Legal Personhood.”
20. Melville, Redburn, 339.
21. In chap. 53, entitled “The Gam,” Ishmael provides a description of the gam as the maritime custom most typical of whaling ships, where a social encounter occurs between two ships and their crews on cruising grounds, involving the exchange of friendly greetings, letters, newspapers and/or whaling intelligence (196–9).
22. The Pequod's gams with other whalers were also analyzed by Bezanson in “Moby-Dick: Work of Art,” while Wright's “Biblical Allusion in Melville” distinguishes between whalers which have encountered Moby-Dick and those which have not.
23. For an analysis of how, in “Benito Cereno,” Melville renames the historical ship the Perseverance into the Bachelor's Delight, its implications and connections with the Bachelor and the Delight in Moby-Dick, see Feltenstein, “Melville's ‘Benito Cereno,’” 249.
24. Deleuze and Guattari, What Is Philosophy?, 159. Deleuze also discusses the event and its (counter-)effectuations, including the embedded quotation from Joë Bousquet, with Parnet in “On the Superiority:”
Stoic morality is undoubtedly this: not being inferior to the event, becoming the child of one's own events. The wound is something that I receive in my body, in a particular place, at a particular moment, but there is also an eternal truth of the wound as impassive, incorporeal event. (65)
25. Melville, Redburn, 119–20.
26. Agamben, Homo Sacer; Deleuze and Parnet, “On the Superiority,” 32; Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 275, 269.
27. Deleuze and Parnet, “On the Superiority,” 70–1; Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 555.
28. Revising Goffman's concept of “total institutions” in their analysis of the organization of shipboard space, Perry and Wilkie state that “To talk of a single authority [on board ship] is to neglect the different bases upon which authority rests and which are central to an understanding of relationships on board” (“Social Theory and Shipboard Structure,” 33). A typical merchant ship has multiple occupational divisions, the authors state, and “Except for the captain and departmental heads, any member of the ship's complement is typically subject to one of these authority structures in his working activities,” while the captain's authority is the vessel of the law beyond the sailor's working hours (33). Bearing in mind that Perry and Wilkie's observations specifically refer to a twentieth-century merchant steamer, an extrapolation of these principles to Melville's literary texts increases readerly awareness of the multiple seats of authority that a sailor answers to, and illuminates specific narrative functions such as the place of Doctor Long Ghost in Omoo or the harpooners in Moby-Dick, the tension between Ahab's and Starbuck's interpretations of the law, or the comradery among the topmen in White-Jacket.
29. The account of Cereno's deposition lists the exact crew members who were thrown overboard, killed, or kept alive for the purposes of navigation (743–4).
30. For recent discussions of physical and symbolic male-on-male rape in “Benito Cereno,” see, for example, Roth's Gender and Race, 237, and Hannah's “Queer Hospitality in ‘Benito Cereno.’” Cannibalism in the novella is explored by Baines in “Ritualized Cannibalism in ‘Benito Cereno,’” and by Skubal in Word of Mouth, 127–30.
31. Melville, Mardi, chaps 19–37. Subsequent references will be cited parenthetically.
32. Bender, Sea-Brothers, 6; Egan, “Cooper and His Contemporaries,” 78.
33. Tanner, Sea Stories, xii–xiii; Raban, Oxford Book of the Sea, xvii.
34. Philbrick, Cooper and American Sea Fiction, 121, 145.
35. Peck, Maritime Fiction, 14.
36. Ibid., 28, 90.
37. Ibid., 14.
38. Foucault and Miskowiec, “Of Other Spaces,” 27.
39. Casarino, Modernity at Sea, 20–1.