Roped Solidarity

The Aesthetics of Human-Animal Bonding in Melville’s Moby-Dick and Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea

Abstract

This paper investigates the literary aesthetics of ropes and argues that ropes represent a poetics of connection and disconnection between humans and other (non)humans in the spirit of new materialism. Drawing on Michel Serres’s philosophical contract theory, ropes can be regarded as the cords of an accord, which become taut and visible in seagoing narratives; in this paper, Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick (1851) and Ernest Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea (1957) are discussed, as both novels devote much attention to the ship’s rigging or rope-work, as well as to the lines of attachment between humans and whales or marlins respectively. Both novels show that upon being roped, an aesthetics of spectrality is introduced, marked by a radical dissolution of binaries such as active/passive or subject/object. This paves the way for a poetics of solidarity, especially in those moments in which the ropes are taut and solid so that the pulls of either agent are felt.