1Perhaps unsurprisingly, the cover of David Haven Blake’s The Prosthetic Arts of Moby-Dick features a prosthetic leg—not the quintessentially Ahabian ivory leg, but a rather unsophisticated wooden one, held at the Whaling Museum in New Bedford. Yet the book is, overtly, only partially about artificial limbs—at least material ones. Blake brings together the idea of prosthesis (both literal and figurative) and the pervasive imagery of Islam in the novel to partially recuperate, but fundamentally complicate, Cold War readings of Ahab as a tyrannical captain. In Blake’s perceptive reading, Ahab is indeed a dangerous tyrant but, unlike Cold War critics, he refuses to absolve Ishmael.

2In Blake’s conceptualization, the “prosthetic arts” of Moby-Dick refers to “both the centrality of Ahab’s ivory limb and the ways in which it provides a model for understanding other features of Melville’s book” (6). As the book traces the movement from grief to grievance to aggrievement, which he considers one of the main themes of the novel (1), the focus moves from the medical artifact as the material locus of loss or grief to the multiple figurative prostheses (namely, the crew) that assist Ahab in his aggrievement—that perpetual resentment that impels, and seemingly justifies, his vengeful hunt. The progression from grief to aggrievement, which Blake spells out in the Introduction (“The Ivory Leg”), permeates the entire book: the novel posits injury (both as physical wound and metaphysical affront) as the basis of consensus and appeal. “Ahab’s wounds,” writes Blake, “become the source of personal power and communal aggrievement” (2). Yet the originality of this compelling book lies in Blake’s interest in “Melville’s decision to frame that vengeance with images of violence from Muslim-majority regions of the world” (1) to the extent that Islam plays a “prosthetic role” in “Ahab’s revenge” (6). Blake’s work situates itself within a scholarly tradition that analyzes the influx of Islam in Melville’s works and times (Dorothee Metlitsky Finkelstein, Timothy Marr), yet his focus is on Fedallah’s political and aesthetic purpose in Moby-Dick. In his reading, indeed, Fedallah becomes the novel’s main prosthesis, both in terms of plot (a prosthesis to Ahab) and of narration (a prosthesis to Ishmael, or a “crutch” to the narrative, as Blake writes, borrowing from disability scholars David Mitchell and Sharon Snyder). The book, then, as its author concedes, combines “seemingly disparate themes” (2), from dismemberment and disability to geopolitics and Orientalism, and American democracy. Yet its clear tripartite structure secures the argument’s coherence and cogency.

3Part I, “Staging Disability,” focuses on Ahab’s literal prosthetic limb—or limbs, since, as Blake reminds us, the novel mentions at least four artificial legs (57). Impressively well researched and carefully informed by disability studies, this section offers a highly instructive account of amputation, medical intervention, prosthesis design, and phantom limb syndrome that not only reveals the pervasiveness of disability discourses in the antebellum United States (6), but also contours the crew’s various responses to Ahab’s injury. Nor is Blake’s investigation limited to Moby-Dick. As he explains, “to understand Ahab’s prostheticization of others” it is fundamental to consider that “the ivory leg exists within a system of disabilities and accommodations that Melville creates not just on the Pequod but across multiple ships, settings, and books” and that reflects the “prevalence of artificial limbs in nineteenth-century American society” (29). From Peter Stuyvesant to Lord Nelson, from White-Jacket’s sadistic surgeon Cuticle to Mardi’s Samoa, Chapter One, “Ahab, Walking,” explores historical and fictional limb loss to assess the different possible meanings attached to disability, as the gist of the chapter lies in the communal rather than the personal experience of loss. As Blake demonstrates, Melville turns to Shakespearean drama to depict disability and to explore the impact of Ahab’s prosthesis on the crew. The full array of reactions (from Stubb, Flask, Pip) prompts us to consider, as Blake writes, “whether Ahab’s disability resides in his lost leg or in the crew members who react to its sight and sound on deck” (45). Sound, as Blake notes, is crucial in staging Ahab’s disability: “The crack of Ahab walking pervades the ship, endowing him with such presence that crew members have no refuge from his aggrievement” (26). Pervasive, loud, intrusive—in Blake’s astute reading, aggrievement becomes contagious and wounds turn into a “source of collective meaning and collaborative work” (55), an idea taken up again and amplified in Part III. The following chapter, “Bone to Bone,” moves from the desmological, or relational if you will, to the ontological questions connected with prostheses. The ivory leg is here seen in its raw materiality (and in the all-too-present immateriality of the phantom limb) and read in sharp contrast with Captain Boomer of the Samuel Enderby, the “ship that disables [Ahab]” (81), and his artificial arm. If Boomer embodies, famously, a response to trauma and disability that fundamentally differs from Ahab’s (78), Blake sees the encounter as symptomatic of his totalizing desire for revenge: “The ivory leg symbolizes to the captain not just the whale that dismasted him but the value of aggrievement” (81). This section is in fluid conversation with disability studies scholars (Sharon Snyder and David Mitchell, Tobin Siebers, Lennard Davis, Sari Altschuler)—a perspective that The Prosthetic Arts of Moby-Dick overtly embraces. “In Ahab’s prostheses,” Blake writes early in the book, “we find pain, loss, and dispossession, but also the potential for embodiment, empowerment, and charismatic leadership” (12). As trenchant as Blake’s analysis is, at times one wishes that the latter were more apparent in the book. At the end of the introduction Blake writes: “Embedded in Ahab’s ivory leg are wounds and healing, destruction and capability, isolation and community. But as the whale and the human bones come together […] we find fellowship built not on love but on a sense of injury” (21). Although I understand how this sense of injury is crucial for the connection between aggrievement and tyranny, additional emphasis on the potentialities of fellowship might have helped to mitigate the negative connotations that the term “prosthesis” sometimes retains in this book. This is less a critique of Blake’s approach than a reflection on a fundamental paradox in Moby-Dick: even as aggrievement sends ship and crew down, certain utopian possibilities stay afloat.

4Part II, “Prosthetic Identities,” clarifies the role of Islam in the “prosthetic arts” of Moby-Dick. Blake examines the recurring trope of Islamized violence in the novel, in the context of a wider “prostheticization of Muslim societies in narratives of American identity originated in the eighteenth century” (92), to reassess the underexamined role of Fedallah. Even as it decries Ishmael’s racist and stereotyped description of the Parsee, seen as the “gothic energy in Moby-Dick” (87), Chapter Three, “The Phantom Fedallah,” focuses on how this Orientalized character, who “combines the prosthetic and the prophetic” (14), enables Ahab’s quest. It is in its application to Fedallah that the figurative potentialities of the term “prosthesis” become particularly productive. The term, literally, encompasses absence and presence, amputation and (bodily) extension, incorporation and Otherness, and, from this perspective, it clarifies the ways in which the prosthetic Fedallah both integrates into, and differs from, Ahab. He, Blake writes, “inhabits the peculiar prosthetic space in which his body is deemed radically other and yet, by virtue of its association with Ahab, not entirely his own” (91), thus representing a “racialized form of embodiment” that “complicates the novel’s larger network of Islamic ideas and imagery” (90). Chapter Four, “Ishmael, Salaaming,” relocates this idea from the level of plot to that of narration. Not only does Fedallah have a decisive role in Ishmael’s survival (and thus in the very existence of the narrative), but Blake posits Fedallah as the phantom hand that guides Ishmael’s (and haunts his story). This incisive chapter, which reveals and condemns Ishmael’s duplicity and his selective cultural relativism, charts Fedallah’s (and Islam’s) paradoxically overbearing influence in Moby-Dick—if the Parsee is necessary both in terms of plot and of narrative mode, the novel, Blake claims, carefully “avoids acknowledging that need” (117). Fedallah thus emerges as a phantom who “empowers Ishmael through his disappearance” (124). Yet the chapter centers on Ishmael’s inconsistencies, caught between his “salaaming” with Queequeg during his “Ramadan,” or otherwise idealizing the ethnic Other through Islamized imagery, and his vilifying the people from Muslim regions, such as Fedallah and the Filipino crew, whom he perceives to be “American rivals in the Asia Pacific” (118). As Blake explains, the disparity is a function of Ishmael’s colonial vision. The “Islamicized stowaways” are described as fierce, faithless, cruel and fanatical—all traits “invaders associate with peoples who refuse to submit” (136). Blake decodes, then, Ishmael’s prostheticization of Islam in terms of geopolitical preoccupations, a fundamental question Part III expands on and complicates.

5In “Bodies Politic,” in fact, the “seemingly disparate themes” (2) of the book (i.e., limb loss, aggrievement, and Islam) converge so as to explore Melville’s larger critique of American capitalism, democracy and imperialism. Drawing on later works, mainly Clarel and “Benito Cereno,” this section looks at Melville’s frequent reliance on images of dismemberment, which “reflect the condition of imperial societies in which some characters use prostheses and others are effectively turned into them” (145). Aggrievement returns as the keyword, as it is seen to sustain tyranny both overseas and at home: “Extending its biopolitical rule to other continents and species,” writes Blake, “the Pequod produces disability as part of a capitalist crusade against its Islamicized enemies” (148). Chapter Five, “The Unnatural Stump,” posits Flask (and his gratuitous cruelty vis-à-vis the whale) as an emblem or metonymy of imperial capitalism through close readings that bespeak “rapacious” relations “of dispossession and control” (148) implicating both humans and non-humans. Yet if, by compassionately attending to the non-human, cetacean world, Ishmael antagonizes Flask, the chapter rather emphasizes his conflicting views. He appears torn between an environmental consciousness that leads him to despise Flask and a “democratic nationalism” bent on protecting the interests of American expansionism. In a powerful reading of “The Grand Armada,” Blake brings Ishmael’s Islamization of space at work in the episode (the Sunda Strait infested with Malay pirates) to bear on questions of geopolitical rivalry, ultimately articulating a “capitalist fantasy” (171) of Western supremacy. Using Clarel, again, as a foil for Moby-Dick, Chapter Six, “Eternal Hacking,” asks how Melville’s representation of dismemberment offers its own political critique (175): what can the “prosthetic arts” of Moby-Dick tell us about “Ahab’s power, Ishmael’s progressivism, and our own critical priorities” (177)? Here Blake engages directly with (and distances himself from) the Cold War paradigm. The challenge, he writes, is to “liberate Moby-Dick from a Cold War context while continuing to think seriously about the novel’s reflection on American wounding and tyranny” (179). Rather than resurrect the old dichotomy between the authoritarian Ahab and the democratic Ishmael, Blake’s book sounds their “symbiotic partnership” (177). If Ahab “creates a feeling of collective dispossession” (181) that secures the fidelity of his crew, he finds a “useful counterpart in Ishmael, who cheers democratic progress and yet avoids the internal confrontations that democracies often demand” (181). If Ahab, as this book thoroughly seeks to demonstrate, obtains political support from “the public recollection of wounds” (177), Ishmael’s passivity, his aversion to political action and conflict, and limited sense of history, together with his thinly concealed colonial, Islamophobic vision, create the perfect breeding ground for authoritarianism: “Ahab’s story concerns the violence of men who have organized themselves behind an authoritarian who has little regard for their well-being. Ahab would not have the power of his prostheticized body if that body had not been both prostheticized and reconstituted in the crew” (199).

6This book could hardly be more timely. Blake has a clear sense of the relevance of understanding how power is grasped and wielded, and Moby-Dick, he writes, “repeatedly alerts us to the importance of following this theme” (179). In the conclusion, “Stuck on a Whale,” Blake does explicitly mention Trump as well as the rise of authoritarianism across the globe, as the proof of the “value of cultural grievance in assembling a populist following” (202). One year from its publication, the War in Iran makes “Ishmael’s antipathy to the novel’s Asian characters” an even more clairvoyant contribution of “Melville’s meditation on US power” (202) in Moby-Dick. Convincingly placing aggrievement as the basis of consensus and appeal, The Prosthetic Arts of Moby-Dick resonates with our current, disturbing awareness on both sides of the Atlantic of the ease, to use Blake’s own words, “with which unchecked democracies can mutate into authoritarian rule” (182).