The ship as assemblage: Melville’s literary shipboard geographies

Abstract

ABSTRACTThe 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.