4 MATERIAL Y MÉTODOS

lighting demand came from the public sector. Sperm oil was used in lighthouses

and city streetlights because of the brightness with which it burned.

In the years before electric or gas lighting, it was sperm whales which afforded artificial lighting during the hours of darkness. To render whales was not only to transform them bodily from the unrepresentable leviathans of the sea to the eminently countable and sellable barrels of oil on the land, it was also to drench society in whale oil in such a way as to make discourses of peace and non-violence impossible. With this in mind, Ishmael seems to bring up an ethical concern for whales only to immediately dismiss it. There is, however, a sense in which the ethics of whaling is a question which is never far beneath the surface of the text and it seems to be a subject which cannot easily be dismissed . In Melville’s time, ethical concern for whales is deeply hypocritical, but for the contemporary reader, the ethical question is differently realised. To digress briefly, the degree to which the status of the whale has changed since the “Golden Age” of whaling could hardly be greater. In 1931, “The Convention on the Regulation of Whaling”221 was signed, a treaty deemed by the UK Joint Parliamentary Secretary to the Ministry of Agriculture and Fisheries as “one of the minor, if not one of the major miracles of human achievement.”222 This convention underwent multiple amendments throughout the twentieth century under the auspices of the International Whaling Commission which set annual quotas for whale fishing, and in 1982 an indefinite moratorium on commercial whaling was declared. It is therefore a shared acknowledgement that 1. Whales are in danger of being hunted to extinction and 2. Whales are worth saving that has brought about an international agreement which, since it necessarily operates at a super-state level, limiting the actions of individual states, acts to compromise and ultimately to spoil the sovereign nature of signatory nations. Thus we find that the majestic or sovereign nature of the whale, the animal of “superior excellence,” acts as a competing and contaminating sovereignty to that of nation states. It is a sovereignty which begins in literature and extends into the world acting, finally, as the saving grace of whales. It seems, indeed, a legitimate question to ask to what extent the novel Moby-

Dick has contributed to the international moratorium on whaling. There is little doubt that the

219

Ibid., 342.

220

Ibid., 344.

221

Alexander Gillespie, Whaling Diplomacy: Defining Issues in International Environmental Law (Cheltenham: Edward Elgar, 2005), 4.

222

Mr. G.R.H Nugent MP. Quoted in ibid.

novel remains widely read, and it seems a prerequisite of any book on whaling, no matter how technical, legalistic, or historical, to make at least one reference to Melville or the Pequod. It is entirely possible that the majesty bestowed on the whale through the novel has contributed to these bold and international attempts to prevent its total destruction.

It is not too much to say, however, that for Melville’s contemporary reader, seeing, especially at night, was intimately connected with the death of whales and this is a fact with ethical

ramifications which Ishmael is acutely aware of. To return to autopsy, Derrida repeatedly stresses its optical nature. Autopsy is, he writes, “a primarily optical experience that aims to touch with the eye what falls under the hand, under the scalpel.”223 He is interested in how Louis XIV, the so-called Sun King, is said to produce light and that therefore the light which exposes the body of the elephant emanates from the king himself. As a metaphor for knowledge, Derrida notes how since the light comes from the king, then everything that is unveiled about the elephant is known in advance and comes from the king himself. As part of an arrangement which does not escape the attention of Melville, in the sub-deck blubber room of the Pequod, the dismembered whale is illuminated by its own light. Before dismemberment has begun, the whale is consumed in a rather direct way by the second mate, Stubb, who instructs the ship’s cook to prepare a steak for him. It is this steak which is eaten by the light of whale oil, an ethical circumstance which is deemed deserving of a chapter in its own right. The chapter, entitled “The Whale as a Dish” begins: “That mortal man should feed upon the creature that feeds his lamp, and, like Stubb, eat him by his own light, as you may say; this seems so outlandish a thing that one must needs go a little into the history and philosophy of it” (325). Outlandish: strange, odd, grotesque, foreign, uncivilized, at sea. Also excessive, over the top, too much, overdone. The chapter details historical and cultural situations in which whale meat and oil have been consumed, noting that in the present time, whale meat tends not to be eaten owing to its “exceeding richness” (326). In other words, the unctuousness of the whale which makes it highly sought after in commercial terms, also renders it inedible. The chapter forms a stout defence of the actions of Stubb, who has consumed a rather overcooked whalesteak in the previous chapter. Ishmael never explains the nature of Stubb’s outlandishness. We can assume that the objection would be to an excessiveness in the consumption of the whale whereby, in a closed economy, the body of the whale would be doubly consumed, firstly by the flame of the oil lamp and secondly by Stubb himself. The objection seems to mirror the biblical injunction

223

Derrida, The Beast and the Sovereign, 2009, 1:277.

against boiling a kid in its mother’s milk224 and this comparison lands us squarely in the realm of ethics.

We are reminded of Picasso’s Guernica. The black and white world of violence and suffering is illuminated by a single light bulb hanging at the top of the painting. The bulb creates an intense claustrophobia, shining on a godless world of manmade violence. Equally, the artificial light of the whale lamp conditions everything seen below deck on the Pequod as well as back on American streets after dark. In an ironic twist, it is the bright whale light shining from

lighthouses which keeps the whaling ships safe at night. There is nothing to be seen outside of the death of whales and if seeing is knowing, then knowledge is conditioned by the death of the whale. Ishmael is keenly aware of the ethics of this situation. Killing whales is, he knows, an ethical issue, but he refuses to give way to sentimentality which would lead to hypocritical ethical demands. “The Whale as a Dish” ends in a cutting satirical tone. Speaking of the

abhorrence with which “landsmen” regard the eating of whalemeat, and reconsidering his initial explanation, Ishmael rages: