The “Odd Inches”: Moby-Dick’s Fossil Record and Melville’s Admeasured Time

Abstract

This paper considers the measurements of fossils and markers of geologic time as they appear throughout Moby-Dick, complicating histories of bodies and their remainders. Looking for instances where Ishmael’s measurements fall short or fail to include the “odd inches,” I argue that such ellipses around quantifiable materiality and ontological ideality urge us to reimagine new subject positions from which to perceive narrative, social and deep time. Reading across Ishmael’s survey of antediluvian remains, I’ll begin with a historicist consideration of debates around biogenesis in Melville’s mid-19th century, moving toward discussion on the coeval times of extinction and exhaustion in Moby-Dick’s antediluvian chronologies, concluding in suggestion that fossil measurement in Melville might best be read as one mode of what Spinoza called an adequate idea, distinguishing the contingent from an extra-historical whole, and, in Melville’s deep vision, a general time which is as prehistorical as it is post-epochal.

Keywords

• anthropocene
• phenomenology
• abiogenesis
• geo-humanities
• eco-criticism
• deep time