Moby-Dick 's Eschatological Animal Apocalypse: Whales in Spirit, Whales in Flesh

Abstract: This essay situates itself within religious and ecological Melvillean criticism to rethink the whale's symbolic allness in Herman Melville's novel Moby-Dick; or, the Whale as symptomatic of anthropocentric or human-centered discourses surrounding extinction and extraction. I argue that these approaches are simultaneously correct and incomplete insofar as Moby-Dick textualizes the whale's multivalent status as religious symbol, agential animal, and economic product. Whales, instead, are a fleshly nothingness of violently dismembered, dismembering bodies in what I view as an animalized apocalypse. By deploying a materialist reading of messianic eschatology, this essay demonstrates that Melville critiques anthropocentric abstraction with three biblical tropes associated with disembodied prophecy, an industrialized Book of Nature, and the representation of Moby Dick as a vengeful God. I read Melville with illustrations by Matt Kish because his revisualization puts Moby-Dick 's religious investment into unstable textual contexts, emphasizing how whales' abstracted physicality simultaneously enfleshes and complicates cultural discourses. I define Melville's animal apocalypse, therefore, as the revelation that human conceptions of the nonhuman world are fictions based in human mastery. But rather than salvation, the novel envisions a de-anthropocentric, if limited, future based in textual and material salvage.